Local organizations working with families in need say they’re nervous about deep budget cuts happening in Washington, D.C.
Earlier this month the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services announced a 20,000 employee reduction as part of the cuts spearheaded by the Department of Government Efficiency. It takes the healthcare agency which includes the FDA, the USDA and the CDC from 82,000 to 62,000 workers.
“It’s going to be chaotic,” Family Health Centers CEO Brad Irwin said. “You can’t let 25 percent of your staff go and not have some ramifications.”
Irwin said he already encountered some of that chaos. The community health nonprofit sees 40,000 patients a year covering the costs even if a patient can’t pay a dime.
Irwin said the $7 million Family Health Centers receives in federal grants make up 10 percent of its annual budget. The funding is like the backbone of his operation, as much of the grant money is used to pay practitioners who see patients.
But Irwin said the entire department who administered those grants was cut from Health and Human Services under the DOGE restructuring. It happened as he was in the midst of tweaking an application related to facilities at the health center’s 100-year old headquarters. Irwin said the person he was working with in Washington D.C. just stopped answering.
“I wrote to another person I knew at HRSA and said what happened to the project officer still there, and they wrote back and said, ‘no, he’s gone he’s been laid off,’” Irwin said.
The overarching concern for many Louisville health and service organizations is cuts in the federal government will disproportionately impact people living in poverty.
“For me as a service provider, it’s a little unsettling,” Metro Louisville Office of Social Services Executive Administrator Cassandra Miller said. “We’re watching what is happening in D.C. very, very closely, and we will adjust accordingly.”
Miller oversees the city’s Neighborhood Place centers which serve as a one-stop shop connecting people to social services like the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program.
The entire team that administers LIHEAP was also among the positions eliminated in Health and Human Services.
“In our community we spent a little more than $5 million on LIHEAP,” Miller said. “This money helped families stay in their house and keep the utilities on. That was 26,000 households in the last year.”
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said he’s focused on cutting “duplications and waste” and when he’s done, his department will be narrowed from 28 divisions down to 15 that all focused on improving America’s health.
“We’re keenly focused on pairing down excess administrators while increasing scientist and front line health providers so we can better the health of the American people,” Secretary Kennedy said in a pre-recorded video released online in early April. “Streamlining HHS is part of a shift to new priorities especially focused on ending the chronic disease epidemic with clean water, safe food, effective medicine, good science, radical transparency and a healthy environment.”
Earlier this week a leaked White House budget proposal showed HHS funding for the Head Start early child education program eliminated in 2026.
Congress passed a stop gap budget that funds the government through September. The two chambers are reconciling their differences on President Trump’s so called “Big Beautiful Bill,” which places most of his key agenda items in one spending package.
The common concern from people working in low-income community centers is whether the federal government will balance the budget on the backs of the poor.
