I received word from several long-established recovery programs today that they expect to be out of business within days, weeks, or months as a result of these funds being pulled.
The damage being done here will be long lasting, not only due to the employees and clients impacted, but due to the impact on the broader business environment as well.
Until now, the government was viewed as a reliable business partner in these industries, and it definitely won't be viewed that way going forward: the chill on investment will be felt for many years to come.
In some ways, I'm starting to view this and related executive funding cuts as a sort of miniature debt default.
The argument in the paper is about clinical efficacy, but many of the comments here argue that even lower clinical efficacy at a greatly reduced cost might be beneficial.
As someone in the industry, I agree there are too many therapists and therapy businesses right now, and a lot of them are likely not delivering value for the money.
However, I know how insurance companies think, and if you want to see people get really upset: take a group of people who are already emotionally unbalanced, and then have their health insurance company start telling them they have to talk to an LLM before seeing a human being for therapy, kind of like having to talk to Tier 1 support at a call center before getting permission to speak with someone who actually knows how to fix your issue. Pretty soon you're seeing a spike in bomb threats.
Even if we pretend someone cracks AGI, most people -- at least outside of tech circles -- would still probably prefer to talk to humans about their personal problems and complain loudly if pressured otherwise.
Maybe if we reach some kind of BladeRunner future where that AGI gets injected into a passingly humanoid robot that all changes, but that's probably still quite a ways off...
https://rollcall.com/2026/01/14/hhs-cuts-2-billion-in-mental...
Damage still done, people.