On January 20, 2025, President Trump signed a Presidential Action entitled Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government which required changes to these Guidelines to enact compliance with the order. At the same time, the Department modified the Guidelines with planned changes to increase efficiency and decrease costs while maintaining the program’s gold standard in quality for drug testing.

In the UrMG, SAMHSA is proposing to raise the cutoff used to identify invalid urine specimens based on pH from 9.0 to 9.5. The cutoff change will reduce the numbers of required confirmatory pH tests, MRO interviews and investigations, and specimen recollections without affecting the program’s ability to identify adulterated specimens. Other revisions to the UrMG and OFMG expected to reduce stakeholder burden include those related to biomarker testing which are expected to lead to definitive results and thus reduce the need for specimen recollection. These revisions also strengthen the Federal Government’s ability to identify illicit drug use and donor attempts to subvert drug tests. SAMHSA is also proposing to reduce the required percentage of controls in initial drug test batches from 10% to 4%, while maintaining the 10% control rule in confirmatory drug test batches. This will reduce laboratory material and labor costs, while ensuring the continued quality of the program. In addition to the revisions described above, the Department has edited the UrMG and OFMG for some items for clarity and/or for consistency.