It’s difficult to get a handle on the scope of the federal budget cuts coming down from the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). But the cancellation of billions of dollars in COVID grants still flowing to state and local health health agencies reported by NBC provides an inside look at some of the programs on the chopping block.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is pulling back $11.4 billion in funds allocated in response to the pandemic to state and community health departments, nongovernment organizations and international recipients, the Department of Health and Human Services confirmed Tuesday.
“The COVID-19 pandemic is over, and HHS will no longer waste billions of taxpayer dollars responding to a non-existent pandemic that Americans moved on from years ago,” HHS Director of Communications Andrew Nixon said in a statement. “HHS is prioritizing funding projects that will deliver on President Trump’s mandate to address our chronic disease epidemic and Make America Healthy Again.“
It may come as a surprise to many taxpayers that funds allocated during COVID continue to be available, years after the pandemic. In fact, some $225 million in COVID grants were still in the pipeline for Minnesota local governments and other recipients. The Post Bulletin notes the news jolted the Minnesota Department of Health, even though many of the affected projects evidently had little, if any, connection to COVID.
“The canceled grants are being talked about as ‘COVID-19 funds,’ but the work they supported was much broader,” MDH spokesperson Andrea Anneman told the Post Bulletin. “Throughout the pandemic we learned more about ways that our system was falling short and leaving people behind. These funds were helping us to close those gaps.”
The news stopped Houston County in its tracks, days before undertaking a construction project with a $332,000 COVID grant.
Renovation work was slated to begin Monday, March 31 inside the Houston County Public Health and Community Services building in Caledonia.
“We had disassembled a lot of different things, moved staff into temporary office space in anticipation of contractors being on site Monday,” said John Pugleasa, Houston County Public Health and Human Services director.
Similar stories have begun to circulate from other local governments.
Up in Red Wing, Goodhue County Health and Human Services had $200,000 remaining of its COVID-19-related grant. Kris Johnson, the department’s deputy director, said Goodhue County HHS spent much of the grant (originally just under $1 million) on COVID-19 response and recovery, including vaccination clinics and community education. More recently, the county used the funds to support community health workers.
“Part of the model for maintaining health care was utilizing community health workers to help people maintain their health care, including things like vaccines and preventative health care,” Johnson said. “That’s part of what we were paying for on an ongoing basis.”
The abrupt elimination of the federal funding will undoubtedly cause local health officials some headaches. Yet clearly much of the remaining funding was to be spent on less than pressing public health concerns in the community.
In Mower County, the grant terminations mean that the county will lose $140,000 in remaining funding that was supposed to last into 2026.
“We had a couple of projects that were in place,” said Crystal Peterson, director of Mower County Health and Human Services. “One was to use some of this funding to support a trailer with some of mobile health efforts. Also, we were looking at revamping where we give immunizations here at the county to make it a little more client-friendly.”
The more than $11 billion in cuts to left-over COVID funding won’t balance the budget, but it’s refreshing to see the feds interested in being “more client-friendly” to taxpayers for a change.