Through the simple three-digit emergency number 988, the national suicide hotline has provided a fast and accessible lifeline to at-risk callers for three years. Now the Trump administration has made official its plan to defund 988’s dedicated counseling for LGBTQ+ youth.
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On Friday, the Department of Health and Human Services released its 2026 fiscal year budget plan. While the HHS anticipates increased caller volume, it requested no increase in budget over previous years. Instead, the HHS will essentially cut all funding to the hotline’s subnetwork serving the LGBTQ+ community.
Rachel Cauley, a spokesperson for the Office of Management and Budget, told NBC News that the budget “does not … grant taxpayer money to a chat service where children are encouraged to embrace radical gender ideology by ‘counselors’ without consent or knowledge of their parents.”
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The law to create the 988 lifeline originally passed the Congressional floor with bipartisan support in 2020, during Trump’s first term. That law, National Suicide Hotline Designation Act, required the creation of dedicated services for the LGBTQ+ community, but the Trump administration now plans to skirt the law by underfunding the program.
Since 2022, 988 callers could press a menu button or text “Pride” to speak with a dedicated counselor specializing LGBTQ+ issues. According to The Advocate, the LGBTQ+ subnetwork has received over 1.3 million crisis contacts.
Nearly half of the call volume has been handled by The Trevor Project, one of the partner organizations contracted by the government to assist managing the program and training counselors. Now the Trevor Project is speaking out about the devastating consequences of eliminating this program.
“We do not have to agree on every policy issue to agree that every young American’s life is worth saving,” The Trevor Project CEO Jaymes Black told The Advocate. “It is deeply upsetting to see the administration reverse course on an evidence-backed, bipartisan program that has successfully provided life-saving crisis care to 1.3 million LGBTQ+ young people and counting.”
“Since the news of this proposal leaked [in April], the Trevor Project has been fighting back—each and every day—to urge our nation’s leaders to reject this fatal proposal,” Black continued.
“In a nation where our children’s tears fall without distinction of how they identify, we must rise with one voice—across every faith, every belief, and every political line—now is the time for the full volume of our conviction.”
The HHS budget cuts are planned to go into effect on October 1.
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