Connecticut health officials are still calculating the impact of the latest funding cuts from the Trump administration and are sounding the alarm that the lost resources will be devastating to local communities.
This comes after federal health officials said Tuesday they are pulling back $11.4 billion in COVID-related funds for health departments nationwide.
“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.
In Connecticut, the cuts are expected to immediately terminate more than $150 million in grants allocated to the state for disease outbreak surveillance, newborn screenings and childhood immunizations, state officials said.
Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont, a Democrat, decried the cuts Thursday. He said the reductions were “abrupt and unexpected” and would have “a devastating impact on our ability to fight disease, protect the health of newborns, provide mental health and addiction treatment services, and keep people safe.”
“I am urging the Trump administration to recognize that these cuts go beyond what is reasonable and reverse this rash and impulsive decision,” Lamont said.
Connecticut Attorney General William Tong said in a statement he would challenge the Trump administration’s decision “to unilaterally rescind Congressionally-authorized funding to states.”
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.
Funding cuts to have immediate impact
Dozens of Connecticut projects funded by the grants were ordered to stop work on Wednesday. Nearly 50 contracts with local health departments for immunization services were also canceled, officials said.
The Infectious Disease Branch, part of the state Department of Public Health, was particularly hard hit – losing roughly $120 million, officials said. That money focused on an array of public health projects including disease surveillance in emergency departments and at nursing homes.
“This is a dark day for public health,” said Dr. Manisha Juthani, state public health commissioner. “COVID-19 may have been the catalyst for these grants but, as Congress intended, these funds were being used to modernize our systems, strengthen our workforce, educate the public, protect our children all to prevent or mitigate the damage to human lives caused by future disease outbreaks.”
“We cannot allow our vital public health functions to become collateral damage in DC’s budget wars,” the unions representing workers at the DPH said in a statement.
Due to the cuts, health care providers will now be forced to fax reportable diseases to DPH, rather than transmitting them electronically, officials said. Lab tests for newborn genetic screenings will be delayed, and Dr. Juan Salazar, physician in chief at Connecticut Children’s, said, “when it comes to identifying these disorders, time is of the essence.”
Juthani said, there’s a 97.7% measles vaccination rate for kindergarteners in Connecticut, but not at every school. The funding helped them to identify and speak to those communities, “to try to understand where their hesitation may be,” she said. “And to try to increase immunization rates in those communities.”
The DPH says the federal cuts will also terminate funding for the “Family Bridge” program, which provides free home visits for newborns from nurses and is currently active in Bridgeport and Norwich.
Connecticut’s Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services says their services are also taking a hit. Those include programs that connect unhoused people with support services for mental health and work. Harm reduction centers could be affected, officials said, interrupting access to overdose-reversing medication like Narcan.
“If that is the case, we will see negative outcomes, deaths of our citizens, our community members within days because there would not be enough Narcan available,” said Dr. Saud Anwar, Senate chair of the public health committee.
“We're doing better, but we still have an opioid crisis, and access to those medications are important to keeping that overdose rate down,” DHMAS Commissioner Nancy Navarretta said. “We know that our nonprofit providers already have limited resources, and we were counting on this revenue to continue these critical programs.”
‘Cruel and unusual behavior’
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.”
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.
The Associated Press contributed to this report. This story has been updated.
