September 18, 2025

Note:  The House of Representatives passed this bill on June 4, 2025.

The Senate passed a bill Thursday reauthorizing major legislation to prevent and treat illicit opioid use, sending it to President Donald Trump’s desk after two years of failed attempts to advance it.

If the president signs it into law, as is expected, the SUPPORT for Patients and Communities Reauthorization Act of 2025 will reauthorize billions of dollars to fight the opioid crisis. More than 76,000 people died of a fatal overdose last year, according to the CDC, most of them due to synthetic opioids such as fentanyl, which drove a record-high number of fatal overdoses during the pandemic.

Sens. Maggie Hassan (D-N.H.) and Bill Cassidy (R-La.) on Thursday went to the Senate floor to ask for unanimous consent to pass the bill. No one objected. That cleared it for Trump, since the House had already passed the bill in June.

The original version of the SUPPORT Act, enacted in 2018, was one of the most significant domestic policy laws of Trump’s first term. But the billions in new funding it authorized were not enough to stave off a pandemic spike that saw well over 100,000 Americans dying annually.

Still, Hassan called reauthorizing the law “essential to our addiction prevention, treatment and recovery efforts.” She said the bill includes funding for addiction treatment for pregnant women and for training and equipment to help first responders.

Hassan hailed a 27 percent drop in the number of drug overdose deaths over the past year but insisted that lawmakers cannot be complacent in the fight against the opioid crisis. The timing of the decline has coincided with both the end of the pandemic and a concerted push during the Biden administration to expand access to naloxone, a drug that can reverse opioid overdoses.

Cassidy, whose attempt to advance the bill last year failed due to Democratic opposition, praised Trump’s effort against fentanyl, noting the president’s policy to control the flow of people coming into the U.S illegally through the southern border and pressing Mexico and China to go after drug cartels and chemical companies that produce and send fentanyl into the U.S.

“I look forward to people coming out of addiction,” Cassidy said on the Senate floor.

Why it matters: The law lapsed two years ago, and lawmakers, particularly in the House, have tried to reauthorize it since.

Congress has nonetheless continued to fund the services to prevent and provide treatment and support to people with opioid use disorder.

In the House, the legislation faced opposition from some leading Democrats frustrated with the Trump administration’s cuts to federal addiction treatment programs. Rep. Frank Pallone of New Jersey, the top Democrat on the Energy and Commerce Committee, which has jurisdiction, pointed to those cuts, as well as Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s plan to fold the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration into a new agency focused on chronic diseases inside the Health and Human Services Department.

House Democrats who opposed the reauthorization also slammed Republicans’ overhaul of Medicaid. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act that Trump signed in July will cut hundreds of billions from the health insurance program for low-income people over the next decade. Democrats argue the cuts will undermine addiction treatment.