A bill on the normally bipartisan issue of combating America’s opioid epidemic faced some opposition from Democrats in the House of Representatives on Wednesday, but still passed handily.
Dubbed The SUPPORT for Patients and Communities Reauthorization Act of 2025, the legislation reauthorizes funding for the fiscal years 2026 to 2030 for grants and other programs related to combating substance abuse. The bill passed the House on Wednesday by a bipartisan vote of 366 to 57.
“After several years of bipartisan collaboration on the SUPPORT Act, the House of Representatives passed legislation to continue fighting the fentanyl crisis by improving access to treatment, expanding recovery opportunities, and bolstering prevention initiatives,” Rep. Brett Guthrie, R-Ky., the sponsor of the bill, told The Daily Signal.
“The programs within the SUPPORT Act have made significant steps toward reducing the toll illicit fentanyl and fentanyl-related substances take on our communities. By reauthorizing this important legislation, we are increasing prevention initiatives, reducing drug-related deaths, and restoring hope for families. I thank my colleagues for their bipartisan commitment to saving lives,” the Kentucky congressman said.
The first SUPPORT Act was authorized during President Donald Trump’s first term. Congress has continued to appropriate money to the programs the bill funds, although the legislation expired almost two years ago.
The efforts to combat the opioid crisis appear to have had some effect. There were fewer than 55,000 opioid overdose deaths in the U.S. in 2024, a significant decrease from the more than 83,000 deaths in 2023.
The federal grants, which originally totaled billions of dollars, go to programs designed to combat substance abuse in pregnant and postpartum women, prevention of drug overdoses, and support for recovery programs, among other things.
Fighting drug abuse is generally a rare issue of bipartisanship, but the new bill faced challenges in recent months. Some Democrats came out against the legislation, citing the Trump administration’s plans to reform the federal health bureaucracy as their reason for voting against it. About half of Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration employees have been terminated by the second Trump administration in an apparent effort to return to the number of personnel that existed in the federal agency prior to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Some Republicans are critiquing the legislation for being a potential money pit with little built-in accountability for the use of federal dollars—specifically, the kind of waste, fraud, and abuse that the Department of Government Efficiency was created to combat.
Paul J. Larkin, the senior legal research fellow at the Edwin Meese III Center for Legal and Judicial Studies at The Heritage Foundation, has several concerns about the bill.
“The bill has no standard for defining success for any of the programs that it authorizes,” Larkin told The Daily Signal.
Larkin also criticized the bill for lacking “criteria to be used to decide who is qualified to receive federal funds” and an “accrediting or auditing mechanism, body, or person to evaluate the success of any of the programs that it authorizes.”
The bill “does not empower the [Department of Health and Human Services] secretary, one of the assistant secretaries, or anyone else to halt funding to any program that has not been proven successful, that has wasted federal funds, that has defrauded the federal government, or that has used authorized funds for any improper purpose,” he noted.
Larkin expressed qualified support for the creation of a federal interagency fentanyl task force. That provision “seems to be a good one, but I do not understand why there needs to be a statutorily authorized task force to undertake that assignment,” he said.
“The president can create one by executive order, and he certainly likes using EOs to do anything and everything that he believes is a good idea,” Larkin noted.