I remember reading a story late last year about a 16-year-old kid in Alabama who called the LGBTQ crisis line instead of going through with a suicide pact that he and three of his friends had made. The 2024 election had just been called for Donald Trump, and they took that as confirmation that their lives didn’t really matter to anyone.

Kill yourself over an election result? To most adults that probably sounds completely irrational, but then again most adults aren’t queer teenagers living in Alabama. Teenagers who are already in crisis don’t think the way that policy analysts do, they’re scared and they’re hurting, and the part of their brain that handles impulse control and long-range thinking is still under construction. When you pile on raging hormones, identity turmoil, and the constant low-grade anxiety that comes with feeling unsafe in your own skin, a single bad headline can feel like proof that your worst thoughts about yourself are actually true.

In that fog, one of those kids did something brave and picked up the phone. A counselor who actually understood what he was dealing with answered, intervened, brought the other three into it, got families involved, and now all four of those kids are alive today.

This is a story about survival, not politics. And it’s about why immediate, specialized support matters.

If an LGBTQ youth dials 988 and presses 3 (or texts PRIDE to the same number), they are connected to a counselor trained to understand what they’re going through. These counselors are often folks from The Trevor Project, the nation’s leading LGBTQ youth crisis organization. The creation of “988, press 3” system wasn’t a symbolic gesture. It was a response to the brutal reality that queer youth are at significantly higher risk of suicide, and that generic emergency services often miss the mark. It was launched in 2022 with bipartisan support and designed to be the mental-health equivalent of 911: easy to remember, nationally accessible and equipped for specialized help. Veterans press 1. Spanish speakers press 2. Queer youth press 3. It’s simple, afordable, and life-saving. More than a million LGBTQ youth have turned to this service since late 2022, and now it’s on the chopping block.

According to a leaked draft of the Trump administration’s 2026 budget, that third option will soon be gone. The proposed cuts would eliminate all federal funding for the LGBTQ Youth Specialized Services arm of 988 starting October 1st of this year.

I live in Texas, which seems to grow more hostile by the week. My daughter identifies as queer and people sometimes tell me she’s “lucky” to have supportive parents. I know they mean that as a compliment, but the fact that anyone calls that luck should tell you everything you need to know about the situation a lot of these kids are in.

Plenty of kids aren’t so “lucky.” Some get kicked out of their homes for coming out or risk suspension just for saying they’re gay… looking at you, Florida. In red states like mine, identity is political, and in this kind of environment a crisis line isn’t just a helpful resource. It’s a genuine lifeline in every sense of the word.

In late 2023, nearly 10% of all 988 contacts came through via pressing 3, the LGBTQ option. Among texters (the format most younger users prefer) it was 16%. More than 188,000 queer youth reached out in just a few months.

If you need more evidence that the need is still very much there, look at what happened after the election. The Trevor Project reported a 700% surge in contacts to the organization; on Inauguration Day, another 33%. Maybe you dismiss that as panic, but with this administration already rolling out anti-LGBTQ policies, it sounds a lot more like awareness.

Despite what the administration will try to tell you, this particular cut isn’t really about cost. The LGBTQ option costs roughly $50 million a year to run, less than 0.1% of the U.S. Health and Human Services Department’s discretionary budget. Veteran services stay fully funded, as they absolutely should, but the double standard is glaring.

As a combat vet, if I need mental health support, I can press 1 for specialized help. But if my daughter or any kid like her presses 3 after October, they’ll get silence. My kid has support at home, but for the kids who don’t, that silence could be the final nail in the coffin. Yes, that phrasing was intentional. It seems we’ve decided that some lives warrant tailored help, while others just don’t.

The Trump administration is calling this an “efficiency” overhaul. HHS faces a 30% cut that would be the largest contraction of that department in modern history. Elon Musk’s shiny new Department of Government Efficiency ordered every agency to slash a third of discretionary spending. Killing a $50 million hotline gets you about 0.1 percent of the way toward that goal. It’s cheap to cut, gold for culture-war points.

Departments were told to ax anything labeled “woke ideology,” and apparently, suicide prevention now falls into that category.

Leadership’s silence is deafening and HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is no exception. His second wife tragically died by suicide, and you’d think that alone would push him to defend a program like this. Instead, nothing but crickets. Maybe he’s just too busy peddling conspiracy theories or reminiscing about the time he staged a fun little prank by dumping a dead bear in Central Park. Who the fuck knows. 

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen rollbacks targeting basic protections. Since returning to office, Trump has dismantled civil rights rules, choked off health care access and rubber-stamped “religious exemptions” that let providers flat-out refuse care. So it’s not like cutting a suicide crisis line is surprising at this point, but it still manages to be a new low, because there’s no pretense here, no public safety argument, no parental rights framing, just the elimination of help for kids who needed it.

During a recent late-night expedition into the depths of Reddit and Twitter, the most common defense I came across was: Well, The Trevor Project still has its own hotline, just like they did before “Press 3” existed… kids can just use that. Sure, they can, but without the federal dollars, Trevor will have fewer counselors, longer waits, and a much smaller reach.

Meanwhile, 988 will remain, for everyone, just without the specialists who actually know what these kids are dealing with. Telling them that’s good enough is like shutting down the fire department and saying, “Don’t worry, the police still respond to emergencies.” 

Just hand the hose to a guy with a badge and hope for the best.

And it’s worth remembering that 988 Press 3 wasn’t designed for kids who already had The Trevor Project’s number saved in their phone. It was built for the ones who didn’t know it existed, the kid who’s typing something into Google at two in the morning who needs help that’s immediate and national and simple enough to remember in a moment of crisis. We built that infrastructure, it was working, and now we’re tearing it down, not because it failed at what it was supposed to do, but specifically because it succeeded.

I’m not writing this to debate whether queer kids deserve mental health care. That question should have been settled decades ago. I’m writing as a dad who wants his daughter, and every at-risk child, to have support when they need it. We tell kids to speak up, ask for help, reach out, and then we turn around and gut the very system we told them to trust.

What’s happening here isn’t about the money, and anyone who tells you it is hasn’t done the math. This program costs roughly what Musk pulls in over a couple of hours, a rounding error against a federal budget full of billion-dollar line items. The data on whether it works is pretty clear too, so it’s not that. What it actually is, is ideology dressed up as fiscal responsibility, a handout to the evangelical right that put Trump back in office.

It’s a cowardly move made by cowardly, insecure men so wrapped in religious dogma, so desperate to preserve political favor, or so terrified of other people’s identities, that they’re not just willing to let American youth suffer. They’re willing to let some of them die.

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Nick Allison is a college dropout, a former Army infantryman, and a writer based in Austin, Texas. A slightly left-of-center political independent with a distrust of all ideologies (including his own), Nick spends too much time reading about history, democracy, and systems in collapse and not nearly enough time being optimistic about any of it. He writes about politics and culture and stubbornly still believes that doing what we can to prevent child suicide shouldn’t be considered an extreme political view.

Also, he secretly enjoys writing his own bio in the third person, probably because it makes him feel a little smarter and more important than he actually is.