Trump Makes an Announcement, Jan. 29, 2026
January 29, 2026 · The White House · 0:22:01
Embedded from the source channel — never re-uploaded. Watch on YouTube
What happened
President Donald Trump signed what he called “a historic executive order to combat the scourge of addiction and substance abuse” at the White House on January 29, 2026, creating the Great American Recovery Initiative. “There’s nothing more important than what we’re doing right now,” he said.
The initiative’s co-chairs, as the President introduced them, are Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and senior adviser Kathryn Burgum. Also present and thanked were Attorney General Pam Bondi, Secretaries Doug Burgum, Scott Turner, and Doug Collins, Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, FDA Commissioner Marty Makary, NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya, CMS Administrator Mehmet Oz, and Office of National Drug Control Policy Director Sara Carter.
Why it matters
Addiction recovery is a Kennedy-portfolio priority that reaches across HHS, Justice, and the drug-control office — the whole health-and-enforcement bench was on stage. The initiative gives the addiction beat a named program and named leadership whose work this chronicle can follow.
Scoreboard watch
This is a candidate item for the weekly scoreboard: an executive-order signing creating a named initiative with named co-chairs, announced January 29, 2026.
Sources: The White House, “President Trump Makes an Announcement, Jan. 29, 2026” (official upload, embedded above). Remarks as delivered at the event; attendees as named by the President. Note the transcript renders two names approximately (“Katherine Bergam,” “Sarah Carter”); the spellings used here follow the officials’ roster records.
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