Rep. Mike Lawler Breaks From Trump Admin Over Shutdown of Youth LGBTQ+ Suicide Hotline

New York Rep. Mike Lawler is among the first lawmakers in the Republican Party to break with the Trump administration over its decision to shut down a national youth LGBTQ+ suicide hotline.

The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, run by the Department of Health and Human Services, issued a statement Tuesday that on July 17 the national suicide prevention hotline will stop offering specialized services for LGBTQ+ callers.

“This is wrong,” Lawler wrote on X in response to a Rolling Stone article about the cuts. “According to studies, LGBTQ+ young people have an elevated risk of suicide and are more likely than their peers to attempt it. We should ensure they have the resources necessary to get help. The 988 hotline has been a lifesaver. This decision should be reversed.”

Lawler first spoke up against the cuts in early May, when the administration signaled plans to eliminate funding for the program in the 2026 budget. Lawler addressed a letter to Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., referencing a 2021 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study on high rates of suicidal ideation in LGBTQ+ youth.

“Eliminating these support systems would be a devastating setback, stripping away a critical resource for youth already at elevated risk. It would also likely result in increased emergency room visits, hospitalizations, and long-term mental health consequences—placing further strain on our healthcare system and families alike,” Lawler wrote.

A statement Tuesday from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration said the accelerated timeline was based on a decision to “no longer silo LGB+ youth services, also known as the ‘Press 3 option,’ to focus on serving all help seekers, including those previously served through the Press 3 option.”

The statement omitted the “T” which served to include transgender people in the well-known acronym.

The Trevor Project, a nonprofit focused on suicide prevention for LGBTQ+ individuals that held the contract for the hotline, has said even without the federal partnership it will continue to provide its own crisis services. The nonprofit sees about 500,000 people, 231,000 of which come through the national 988 hotline, The New York Times reported.

“Suicide prevention is about people, not politics. The administration’s decision to remove a bipartisan, evidence-based service that has effectively supported a high-risk group of young people through their darkest moments is incomprehensible,” Jaymes Black, CEO of The Trevor Project, wrote in a statement Wednesday.

More than 100 House Democrats and seven senators, wrote a similar letter in May echoing Lawler’s concerns, highlighting the outsized rates of suicide and mental health issues in LGBTQ+ youth.

The White House Office of Management and Budget has previously described the hotline’s LGBTQ+ section as “a chat service where children are encouraged to embrace radical gender ideology by ‘counselors’ without consent or knowledge of their parents.”

HHS is not the only agency to take steps to support the president’s goals to eliminate services for transgender people. The Department of Housing and Urban Development has taken steps to restrict public housing services from individuals based on gender identity; and the Department of Homeland Security removed “sexual orientation” and “gender identity” from the list of factors that may not be used as the sole basis for intelligence gathering, removing their protected status.

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Amelia Benavides-Colón is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow.