the lgbtq youth crisis line is back after 14 months. it took an act of congress. we still don't know who picks up.
via Sen. Tammy Baldwin, the Congressional Equality Caucus, WBAY and NPR
If you are an LGBTQ+ young person and you need it: call 988 and press 3 to reach a counselor trained for you. As of Wednesday, that works again.
It had not worked since July 17, 2025, when the Trump administration shut down the 988 Lifeline's specialized LGBTQ+ youth services, the day after the lifeline's third birthday, as NPR and the Trevor Project reported at the time. Sen. Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin and the House's Congressional Equality Caucus both announced on Sept. 30 that the option is back, 14 months later. We could not find an announcement from HHS or SAMHSA confirming it, and SAMHSA's site was not reachable from here, so for now this is the word of the people who fought for it.
how press 3 came back
Not by a change of heart. "When I realized the Trump Administration was not going to do it on their own, I wrote it into federal law to require them to restore the Press 3 option," Baldwin said in her release.
The mechanism is less dramatic than that sentence and more durable. The spending package signed in February funds "Specialized Services for Youth" on 988 at $33.1 million and tells SAMHSA to follow a Senate report that "restores $33,100,000 for these services," according to the joint explanatory statement and the Senate report it points to. WBAY notes the relaunch landed on the final day of the deadline Congress had set.
"The bill mandating the restoration of these services became law in February," said Rep. Mark Takano, who chairs the caucus. "It should never have taken this long for the Administration to restore these lifesaving services."
what was lost
When it was cut, HHS said the option had "run out of congressionally directed funding," a spokesperson told NPR. The Trevor Project, which says it handled more than half of those contacts, said the shutdown "cut a literal lifeline that has provided 1.5 million LGBTQ+ youth with suicide prevention services." KFF, working from the lifeline administrator's data, put LGBTQ+ youth at roughly 10 percent of all 988 contacts.
the part we're still watching
Who answers the phone now is not public. In August, the Advocate reported that SAMHSA would not name the new providers and that the Trevor Project's bid had been turned down. "The exclusion of our nearly 30 years of expertise is of course disappointing," its CEO, Jaymes Black, said then.
The other open question is who counts as covered. In June, SAMHSA said it was working out the restoration "while ensuring compliance with Executive Order 14168," the order requiring federal agencies to recognize only two sexes, according to a letter quoted by the Advocate. Whether a trans kid who presses 3 gets the same help as a gay one is the thing to ask next, and we will.
For now, the number works. Pass it on.
