Sponsors (3)
Introduced December 11, 2025 by Danny K. Davis · Last progress December 11, 2025
The bill directs substantial new federal funding and programs to expand trauma‑informed care, early childhood mental health, and clinician workforce capacity—especially in high‑need communities—but does so at sizable cost with administrative requirements and competitive structures that may disadvantage small/rural providers and impose burdens on implementing institutions.
Children and young children in high‑need communities gain expanded access to coordinated, evidence‑based trauma and early childhood mental health services through local demonstration projects and a national network of training institutes.
Aspiring and current clinicians, and the patients they serve, benefit from increased workforce development and clinician availability via scholarships, stipends, mid‑career training, graduate tracks, NHSC awards for school/community sites, and hospital‑based intervention funding.
Communities with high overdose, violence, or child welfare/juvenile justice involvement receive prioritized federal grants and pilot funding to expand trauma‑informed services, workforce training, and school‑based supports.
Taxpayers face substantially higher federal spending—hundreds of millions annually in authorized grants and programs—to support the expansions authorized by the bill.
Grantees and federal/state agencies will incur significant administrative and implementation burdens from grant competitions, data collection and reporting, interagency coordination, and new program development, which can divert resources from direct services.
Smaller, rural, or community‑based organizations may be disadvantaged by eligibility rules (stakeholder representation requirements) and competitive grant designs that favor larger institutions, limiting equitable access to funds.
Based on analysis of 3 sections of legislative text.
Creates HHS grants for community trauma-resilience demonstration projects, expands workforce recruitment/training, and authorizes FY2026–2030 funding for school/community service and infant/early-childhood mental health training.
Creates a new HHS grant program to fund local demonstration projects that coordinate services to prevent or reduce community trauma and toxic stress and to build resilience, with awards up to $6 million per project for four-year periods. It also amends health workforce authorities to reauthorize and modify a trauma-informed care interagency task force, require targeted recruitment and community partnerships for certain health workforce programs, add annual funding for service locations in schools and community settings for FY2026–FY2030, and establish a national Infant and Early Childhood Mental Health Clinical Leadership Program with annual authorized funding for FY2026–FY2030 to develop training institutes for culturally responsive, trauma-informed infant/early-childhood clinical mental health care. The bill sets who may apply (states, counties, local governments, tribes, nonprofits), requires broad local stakeholder representation and trauma-informed expertise for applicants, prioritizes communities with high rates of trauma, and authorizes multi-year workforce and training dollars to build capacity in schools, community settings, and health systems. Appropriations are authorized for future fiscal years but not specified as immediately available in the text provided.