States are scrambling to respond after the Trump administration abruptly cancelled billions in unspent Covid-19 relief grants last week, first yanking about $12 billion in funding for public health and then $3 billion for schools.
State health agencies are now laying off workers and struggling to reconfigure public health programs. School districts may have to cancel services and infrastructure upgrades they were counting on federal dollars to pay for.
“These cuts are reckless and irresponsible, allowing us very little time for contingency plans,” New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy (D) said in a statement decrying education funding cuts announced Friday. The Trump administration is clawing back $85 million promised to 20 New Jersey school districts, according to his office.
A coalition of 22 Democratic attorneys general and two Democratic governors have sued to try to restore the public health grants, arguing that the money was yanked arbitrarily and unlawfully.
The Trump administration told states early last week that it was cutting off grants issued by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration to help states and localities respond to the Covid-19 pandemic and bolster their public health programs.
“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 to multiple news organizations.
States had been using the money on a range of public health activities, including promoting vaccines, monitoring and responding to infectious disease outbreaks and expanding the new 988 suicide and crisis hotline.
The Trump administration then on Friday told state education leaders that it would no longer give certain school districts extra time to spend pandemic relief funds.
“You could not rely on the Department adhering to its original decision [to grant an extension],” Education Secretary Linda McMahon said in a letter to state school leaders published by education news website The 74.
McMahon’s letter said the agency may grant impacted districts an extension “on an individual project-specific basis.” It instructed state leaders to send an email pleading their case.
States have yet to spend some $3 billion of the $122 billion Congress awarded in 2021 under the American Rescue Plan Act, according to documents obtained by The 74.
The canceled SAMHSA grants were scheduled to expire in September and the CDC grants were scheduled to expire next year or in 2027, according to the New York Times.
By canceling the funding early, the Trump administration has plunged state and local health agencies into chaos. State health agencies have already announced plans to lay off public health and behavioral health employees due to the federal cuts.
The Utah Department of Health and Human Services has laid off 37 people after losing $98 million authorized by the 2021 American Rescue Plan Act, money that was supposed to be available through the end of next year.
“We are sorry to see these positions end early,” Tracy Gruber, director of Utah’s Department of Health and Human Services, said in a statement. “We consider them all public health heroes, many of whom joined our department when we needed to ramp up operations to keep Utahns safe during the global pandemic.”
The North Carolina Department of Health plans to pay off 80 people after losing some $100 million in federal funding, according to the Raleigh News and Observer. The Minnesota Department of Health may lay off up to 200 people after losing $226 million, according to Minnesota Public Radio.
“$226 million is about 25% of our budget, right?” Minnesota Health Commissioner Brooke Cunningham told MPR last week. “We’re going to have to go through a serious process to decide, what can we continue to do as we aim to protect and improve the health of Minnesotans?”
Minnesota’s health agency had been preparing to lose the money next summer, she said.
“We sort of did refer to it as the COVID cliff. But as you prepare for a cliff, you try to avoid it,” Cunningham said. “And we had instituted some system changes to make sure that we could think about alternative funding, we could think about people’s jobs that would be on those grants, and could we shift them over to different resources.”