The federal government is pulling back $125 million in funding from the Illinois Department of Public Health and 97 local health departments for activities related to COVID-19 and other infectious diseases, the state health department said Wednesday.
In all, the federal government is slashing $11.4 billion in federal funding across the country for state and local health departments and other health organizations for COVID-19-related activities. The move is the latest by the administration of President Donald Trump to cut costs across the federal government.
“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.
State leaders, however, slammed the decision on Wednesday.
The Illinois Department of Public Health had allocated the money for technology to track the spread of diseases, invest in labs that test samples for infectious diseases, to conduct surveillance of wastewater, to build the public health workforce and strengthen local health departments.
“The decision to terminate already awarded federal funding will cause immeasurable harm and disruption to the health and safety of the people of Illinois and generate larger expenses in the long run,” Gov. JB Pritzker said in a news release Wednesday. “The State of Illinois will do everything in our power to restore this vital federal funding and continue to invest in commonsense public health solutions to keep our state safe and healthy.”
The state health department noted that the funding was awarded to Illinois through the CARES Act during the first Trump administration, and that in addition to pulling back the already-allocated $125 million, the move also blocks up to an additional $324 million the state was slated to get for future work.
A number of local public health departments in Illinois said they were still evaluating the effects of the pullback on Wednesday. Notices about the funding change started going out Monday, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention expects to begin recovering the money within about a month.
Dr. Kiran Joshi, interim chief operating officer of the Cook County Department of Public Health, said in a statement Wednesday that the Cook County department learned Tuesday that two CDC grants to support COVID recovery, health equity and community health worker efforts totaling $31 million were being terminated.
“Much of the funding has already been expended,” Joshi said in the statement. He said the two grants were supposed to end in May and August. “We are still working to determine the specific impact to CCDPH and grant sub-recipients.”
A spokesperson for the Chicago Department of Public Health said in an email Wednesday, “The City is looking into these terminations and their impact on City services.”
Dr. Emily Landon, an infectious disease specialist at UChicago Medicine, on Wednesday called the cuts “short-sighted” in an interview with the Tribune.
“I totally agree we’re no longer in the state-of-emergency situation we were in five years ago,” Landon said. “But this is still a new disease that caused an absolute upheaval in the lives of Americans.”
Landon noted that she was working with a patient Wednesday in UChicago Medical Center’s intensive care unit with COVID-19.
“There is still a lot to learn about about how to treat this,” Landon said. “There’s still a lot to be learned about the consequences of having COVID.”
The Associated Press contributed to this article.
