Federal health officials said Tuesday they are pulling back $11.4 billion in COVID-19-related funds for state and local public health departments and other health organizations throughout the nation.
“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,” the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services said in a statement.
The statement said the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention expects to recover the money beginning 30 days after termination notices, which began being sent out on Monday.
Officials said the money was largely used for COVID-19 testing, vaccination and global projects as well as community health workers responding to COVID and a program established in 2021 to address COVID health disparities among high-risk and underserved patients, including those in minority populations. The move was first reported by NBC News.
Lori Freeman, CEO of the National Association of County & City Health Officials, said much of the funding was set to end soon anyway. “It’s ending in the next six months,” she said. “There’s no reason — why rescind it now? It’s just cruel and unusual behavior.”
In a related move, more than two dozen COVID-related research grants funded by the National Institutes of Health have been canceled. Earlier this month, the Trump administration shut down ordering from covidtest.gov, the site where Americans could have COVID-19 tests delivered to their mailboxes for no charge.
Although the COVID federal public health emergency has ended, the virus is still killing Americans: 458 people per week on average have died from COVID over the past four weeks, according to CDC data.
HHS wouldn’t provide many details about how the federal government expects to recover the money from what it called “impacted recipients.” But HHS spokesman Andrew Nixon said in an email: “The $11.4 billion is undisbursed funds remaining.”
Freeman said her understanding is that state health departments already had the COVID money.
“The funding was authorized by Congress, was appropriated by Congress, and it was out the door, basically, into the hands of the grantees” — states, she said, which decide how to distribute it locally.
Some of the COVID money is used to address other public health issues, Freeman added. For example, wastewater surveillance that began during COVID became important for detecting other diseases, too.
“It was being used in significant ways to track flu and patterns of new disease and emerging diseases — and even more recently with the measles outbreak,” Freeman said.
Under both the first Trump administration and the Biden administration, billions of dollars was allocated for COVID response through legislation, including a COVID relief bill and the American Rescue Plan Act.
At this point, it’s unclear exactly how health departments will be affected by the pullback of funds. But some were starting to look at what it might mean for them. In Washington state, for example, health officials were notified that more than $125 million in COVID-related funding has been immediately terminated. They are “assessing the impact” of the actions, they said.
In Los Angeles County, health officials said they could lose more than $80 million in core funding for vaccinations and other services. “Much of this funding supports disease surveillance, public health lab services, outbreak investigations, infection control activities at healthcare facilities and data transparency,” a department official wrote in an email.
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
