The federal government’s $11.4 billion clawback of COVID-19-era funding to state and local health department funding has sent Texas public health agencies scrambling to make sense of its impact.
The impacted grants funded testing, vaccinations, community health workers and other initiatives during the COVID-19 pandemic, according to NBC News, which first reported on the cuts.
A U.S. Department of Health and Human Services spokesperson said Tuesday the federal administration will prioritize funding to address chronic diseases and fund the Trump administration’s Make America Healthy Again initiative.
“(Health and Human Services) will no longer waste billions of taxpayer dollars responding to a non-existent pandemic that Americans moved on from years ago,” HHS communications director Andrew Nixon told NBC in a statement.
However, North Texas public health leaders say the pandemic revealed a need for greater community monitoring and outreach – and federal funding made it possible for their departments to expand.
Matt Richardson, director of Denton County Public Health, compared public health departments to the United States Secret Service.
“You don’t see the planning that goes into the events,” he said. “You don’t see the protection, you don’t see the hard work, but you do see the events themselves.”
The funding cuts affected six positions at Denton County Public Health, Richardson said, including positions in nursing, community health and epidemiology. He’s working with other county government officials to find other funding sources to extend some of the positions in the county’s existing budget.
“The COVID funds allowed us to expand our disease investigations, and we can’t let that go,” Richardson said. “We’ve got to find a way to save those dollars and those positions.”
A Texas Department of State Health Services spokesperson told KERA the agency is “evaluating the potential effects of the funding changes.”
Dallas County Health and Human Services Director Dr. Philip Huang said two of the county’s largest impacted grants are funded through the DSHS.
One funds lab capacity, including lab equipment that can help test for COVID and measles, as well as epidemiology services such as outbreak investigations and contact tracing. The grant also supported data modernization.
“We’ve gone from at the beginning of COVID dealing with paper faxes of our lab reports and manually entering to try to get it all electronic,” he said.
Another grant impacts immunization efforts, including staffing for vaccination clinics.
“It’s not just COVID vaccinations that they provide, but these are some of the staff that have been doing childhood vaccination,” Huang said.
The employees covered under the grant have also offered vaccinations for the flu and measles. Agencies including DCHHS have reached out to North Texas communities with lower vaccination rates as a measles outbreak affects West Texas, New Mexico and Oklahoma.
Huang said the cuts will greatly impact smaller public health departments as they contend with measles cases.
“Every dollar counts in those settings, and they don’t have as many staff,” he said. “So when you start cutting any staff, that really affects the community’s ability to respond to some of these things.”
A spokesperson with Tarrant County Public Health told KERA the department’s commitment to the community “remains steadfast” through the funding changes, but did not respond to specific questions about the cuts’ impacts.
Got a tip? Email Kailey Broussard at kbroussard@kera.org.
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