The Peer Recovery Workers Who Got Their Grants Back — and Still Don't Know If They'll Have a Job in September

On January 14, 2026 — the day SAMHSA reversed the $2 billion in grant terminations it had issued without warning the previous morning — a peer recovery specialist in central Illinois named Marcus opened a group text to his staff that said: “We’re back. For now.”

The “for now” is still there, five months later. It hasn’t gone anywhere.

Peer recovery support specialists are the workers in the recovery ecosystem who are hardest to categorize and easiest to defund. They’re not clinicians. They don’t hold degrees in social work or counseling. What they hold is their own experience — of addiction, of treatment, of what it actually costs to rebuild a life after years of active use — and they use it to do something no clinical credential can replicate: make another person in crisis believe that recovery is possible, because they are standing in front of them as evidence of it.

The evidence for what they do is not soft. A 2026 systematic review published in PMC found that peer recovery support services increase treatment engagement, reduce hospitalizations, and improve outcomes across substance types. Research from settings ranging from hospital emergency departments to post-incarceration reentry programs consistently shows that peer specialists bridge the gap that clinical services leave open — the gap between “you need help” and “here is how to actually get it, from someone who has navigated these same systems.”

The funding source for most peer recovery programs isn’t a clinical billing code. It’s SAMHSA discretionary grants — the same grants of regional and national significance that the White House FY2026 budget proposal would eliminate entirely.

When the January terminations came, peer recovery programs were among the most vulnerable. They’re not formula block grant recipients with statutory protections. They exist because SAMHSA chose to fund the work directly. Several programs reported to regional journalists that the 24-hour reversal, while financially welcome, had already triggered the conversations that programs dread: which staff could be temporarily laid off, which services would be suspended, which client relationships would be transferred. The reversal stopped the cliff. It didn’t explain what happens at the edge.

What peer recovery workers describe in interviews across multiple regional outlets since January is not panic but a quieter, more persistent form of uncertainty that has its own costs. Planning a program that might not have funding in four months means not hiring. It means not expanding to a new partner site that’s requesting services. It means telling a person in early recovery that the twice-weekly check-in that’s part of their plan might not exist by fall, and watching what that knowledge does to their engagement.

Marcus’s program is funded through September. After that, his organization is applying for a state bridge contract, an emergency foundation grant, and a county behavioral health allocation that had a $200,000 pool for exactly this situation. Every hour his deputy director spends on those applications is an hour not spent on direct service. That math is happening in peer recovery programs across the country simultaneously.

The people who need peer recovery services aren’t experiencing uncertainty. They’re in crisis now. The peer recovery workers who should be available to them are managing paperwork while the federal funding picture resolves — or doesn’t.

“The work is the same,” Marcus told a community newspaper in April. “The people coming to us aren’t any less in need of what we do. They don’t know any of this is happening. Which is exactly how it should be. But somebody has to hold the institutional knowledge about why it’s happening and what it will cost if it goes away.”

“The people coming to us aren’t any less in need of what we do.

The peer recovery workforce is holding that knowledge. The question is whether anyone with the authority to act on it is paying attention.

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Related: Lived Experience & Community · The SAMHSA block grant story: what $813M in categorical grants actually bought