According to an analysis by KFF Health News, reductions to centres for disease control and prevention funding in state and local health sectors had a very uneven impact in response to national political trends. Democracy-led states and selected blue cities fought in court, and GOP-led states suffered major losses as public health efforts were restored.
In late March, the Ministry of Health and Human Services cancelled nearly 700 centres to help with disease control and prevention subsidies across the country. Awarded during the Covid-19 pandemic, they supported efforts to vaccinate people, reduce health disparities among demographic groups, upgrade obsolete systems to detect outbreaks of infectious diseases, and hire community health workers.
Initially, Grant cancelled the blue and red states were almost evenly. Four of the five jurisdictions with the largest number of termination grants were led by Democrats in California, the District of Columbia, Illinois and Massachusetts.
But the balance was reversed after about 20 blue state attorney generals and governors sued in federal court and won an injunction. Of the five states with the highest number of cancelled grants, four are led by Republicans from Texas, Georgia, Oklahoma and Ohio.
In Blue State, nearly 80% of CDC grant cuts have recovered, compared to less than 5% in the red state, according to an analysis by KFF Health News. The amounts of grants reported in the HHS database known as tracking accountability in the government grant system or TAGG often do not match those confirmed by the state. Instead, this analysis focused on the number of grants.
This disparity is an example of polarization permeating healthcare issues, with access to safety net health programs, abortion rights, and the ability of public health officials to respond to disease threats vary widely depending on the party in power.
HHS spokesperson Andrew Nixon said in an emailed statement that the agency “is committed to protecting the health of all Americans, regardless of politics or geography. These funds have been working with the state for a long time to strengthen public health infrastructure and ensure that communities respond safely and the tools they need to respond safely.”
The money in question was not spent solely on COVID-related activities, public health experts say. It also helped to strengthen public health infrastructure and include many types of viruses and diseases, including influenza, measles, RSV, or respiratory syncytial virus.
“It really supported infrastructure on its own, especially in terms of how the nation responds to public health threats,” said Susan Kansagra, chief medical officer of the Association of State and Territorial Health Bureaus.
Trump is the best reported outside the pandemic since 2004, as the US recorded the largest measles and pediatric deaths in more than 30 years during the recent flu season.
After the funding cuts were cut off in court, California retained all the grants the Trump administration had tried to claw, but Texas remains the state with the most grants that ended at least 30.
Colorado, who took part in the lawsuit, was initially fired 11 grants, but then 10 were retained. Meanwhile, adjacent states that did not sue — Wyoming, Utah, Kansas, Nebraska and Oklahoma — lost 55 grants in bulk, but were not retained.
In Jackson, Ohio, one day in March, half a dozen community health workers cancelled the grant five months earlier, and the Jackson County Health Department cut $500,000, and they lost their jobs.
“I had to fire three employees in a day. I didn’t have to do that before. There’s no one outreached in Jackson County anymore,” said Health Commissioner Kevin Aston.
At one point, the funds supported 11 Appalachian Ohio Counties, he said. Now it supports it.
One reassigned employee, Marsha Radhabo, has reduced the community’s health initiatives. She helped provide hot meals to homeless people, and found that many clients were illiterate, so she brought forms for services such as Medicaid and Supplementary Nutrition Assistance Programs, filling in supplementary nutrition assistance programs at local parks.
“We’ll find a place for them to rehabilitate. We’ll take out hygiene kits, blankets, tents, zero-degree sleeping bags and more,” she said. As a counselor, she also reminded people, “They are looking after, that they deserve to be human – because in many cases they are not treated that way.”
Sasha Johnson, who leads the Community Health Worker Program, said people like Radhabo are “basically Walking Human 411” and provide assistance to people in need.
Radabaugh has also partnered with the Food Bank to deliver meals to homemade residents.
Ashton said the sudden way they lost their funds — meaning the county had to pay unemployment for more people unexpectedly — could have ruined the health district financially. Canceling the mid-cycle funds, he said, “It was really scary.”
Longtime anti-vaccine activist and vaccine misinformation promoter, HHS secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. calls the CDC “a cespool of corruption.” At HHS, he took steps to undermine vaccinations in the US and abroad.
Federal CDC funding accounts for more than half of the state and local health sector budgets, according to KFF, a health information nonprofit organization that includes KFF Health News. According to KFF, President Donald Trump said in the 2024 election, the $15 billion CDC share allocated for fiscal year 2023 won the majority of the $15 billion CDC allocated for 2023.
This is reflected by the Trump administration’s nationwide CDC grant termination. More than half of Trump won in 2024, totaling at least 370 terminations before the court case, according to an analysis by KFF Health News.
The Ohio Columbus Health Department received $6.2 million in CDC grants, but about half of that ($3 million) disappeared due to Trump cuts. Columbus Health Commissioner Mysheika Roberts said the city has fired 11 people who worked to investigate the outbreak of infectious diseases at schools and nursing homes.
She also said the city had planned to purchase a new electronic health record system to allow easy access to patients’ hospital records.
“We’ve never gotten a mid-cycle that was pulled out of us for no reason,” Roberts said. “This sense of uncertainty is stressful.”
Columbus did not receive the money directly from the CDC. Rather, the state gave cities the money it received from the federal government. Ohio, led by Republican Gov. Mike DeWine and the Republican Attorney General, did not sue to stop funding cuts.
Columbus sued the federal government in April, along with other Republican-led local governments, along with other democrat-led municipalities based in Harris County, Texas, and Houston. and Davidson County, the metropolitan government in Nashville, Tennessee. Kansas City, Missouri. A federal judge blocked these cuts in June.
By mid-August, Columbus was waiting for funds. Roberts said the city would not rehire staff as federal funds were expected to end in December.
Joe Grogan, a senior scholar at the University of Southern California Schaefer Institute and former director of the White House National Policy Council for Trump’s first term, said the state and local agencies were “not entitled” to federal money awarded “to deal with the emergency.”
“We’ve been throwing money out the door for the past five years,” Grogan said of the federal government. “I don’t understand why there’s a controversy about Covid Money coming back that’s not moving forward.”
Ohio Department of Health spokesman Ken Gordon wrote in an email that the lost $250 million grant helped, among other things, upgrade the disease reporting system and boosted the Public Health Institute’s testing.
Some of the cancelled HHS funds were not scheduled to end over the years, including four grants to strengthen the country’s public health in India, grants to nonprofits in Minnesota that focus on reducing substance use disorders, and several grants to universities on occupational safety, HIV, tuberculosis and more.
Brent Ewig, Chief Policy and Government Affairs Director for the Association of Vaccination Managers, said the cuts were a predictable outcome of “boom, bust, panic and neglect ‘finances’ for public health.”
The association represents vaccination programs for 64 states, local and territorials, and Ewig said there is not much preparation to respond to the outbreak of diseases, including measles.
“The system is blinking red,” Ewig said.
The analysis of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Grants at KFF Health News attempted to answer four questions. 1) How many grants have been terminated in the US under the Trump administration since March? 2) Which states saw the most grant cut? 3) What was the grant? 4) Did the grant end affect the blue, red and purple conditions differently? This follows a similar analysis by KFF Health News, and discusses an article on termination of Nih Nih Grant.
Our main data source was the Ministry of Health and Human Services website indicating the end of the grant. We compared the initial list of grant terminations from April 3rd to July 11th to determine the number of grants restored. The USaspending.gov database helped us track grants by state.
To categorize the nation politically, we followed the same steps from April’s report on the cancellation of the national health subsidies in April. If Democrats had full control of the state government, or if the majority of voters supported the Democratic presidential candidate in the last three elections (2016, 2020, 2024), the state was “blue.” The “red” states were similarly categorized with regard to Republicans. The “purple” states politically divided the state government and were generally considered a battlefield state for presidential elections. The result was 25 red states, 17 blue states, and eight purple states. The District of Columbia was classified as blue using a similar method.
This analysis does not consider the recovery of potential grants in local jurisdictions that were awarded directly or directly from the CDC. This excludes subsidies terminated from compacts of other foreign companies that only occupy the recipient’s location and receive subsidies directly from the Free Association State and CDC. Following the Trump administration’s order to withdraw global health activities and support for the World Health Organization, at least 40 CDC grants aimed at supporting public health activities in other countries have ended.
KFF Health News It is a newsroom nationwide that creates deep journalism on health issues and is one of the core operating programs at the country. KFF – Independent sources of health policy research, voting and journalism.
