The White House on Thursday unveiled a new effort to streamline the country’s response to its drug and alcohol epidemic, pledging to align federal agencies in treating addiction not as a moral failure but as a medical condition.
But the announcement of the Great American Recovery Initiative, as the program is known, was light on details. During an Oval Office signing ceremony, Trump unveiled an executive order that frames addiction as a chronic, treatable disease and pledged to coordinate the federal government’s addiction efforts. Other officials also made sweeping statements about preventing and treating addiction, but provided no specifics and no promises of new funding to carry out the effort.
The program will be jointly led by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Kathryn Burgum, the wife of Interior Secretary Doug Burgum. She, like Kennedy, is in long-term recovery from alcohol addiction.
“This initiative represents a fundamental shift from reaction to prevention, from fragmentation to coordination, from stigma to science, from short-term fixes to long-term recovery,” Burgum said. “For the first time, we’re aligning federal leadership across federal health, justice, labor, housing, veterans, social services, the faith office, and education, around one single shared truth: When addiction is treated early and correctly, people recover and families heal.”
Trump’s announcement could cause confusion on a number of fronts: For one, such an entity already exists. The Office of National Drug Control Policy, an office within the White House established in 1989, already has a mandate almost identical to the one Burgum articulated. According to the White House website, ONDCP “coordinates across 19 federal agencies and oversees a $44 billion budget as part of a whole-of-government approach to addressing addiction and the opioid epidemic.”
Sara Carter Bailey, that office’s newly confirmed director, was present for the Oval Office event, but did not speak.
The White House’s announcement stands in contrast to many of Trump’s actions during the first year of his term.
It came just two weeks after the Trump administration sowed chaos throughout the addiction treatment and prevention world by cancelling, and then reinstating, nearly $2 billion in grant dollars issued by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration.
SAMHSA, the federal agency that funds and oversees addiction treatment, has been largely decimated on Trump and Kennedy’s watch, losing most of its senior leadership and more than half its staff to attrition and layoffs. The agency has also terminated $1.7 billion in SAMHSA block grants.
The Trump administration has declined to appoint a SAMHSA administrator, instead installing addiction counselor Art Kleinschmidt to lead the agency as a senior deputy. He left in December after a roughly eight-month tenure.
Beyond Kennedy and Burgum, numerous high-profile government figures spoke about the toll addiction has taken on their families, including Trump, who referenced his late brother’s struggles with alcohol, as well as White House chief of staff Susie Wiles, Vice President JD Vance, and Steve Witkoff, Trump’s envoy to the Middle East.
“Nearly 50 million Americans suffer from substance use disorder,” Kennedy said. “Many never received treatment. Even more don’t believe that help is possible. That is not because recovery doesn’t work. It’s because our systems have failed to reach the people where they are early enough, long enough, and with dignity. This initiative fixes that.”
Kennedy said more “major announcements” on addiction and recovery were coming next week.
