WASHINGTON — As the Trump administration considers federal funding cuts, Alabama health and education leaders took center stage during a recent hearing to explain how federal money helps the state, and others, respond to disease outbreaks and educate young children.
Appearing before the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education last week, Alabama’s state health officer and a north Alabama Head Start leader stressed the importance of federal funding for Alabama and programs across the country.
U.S. Rep. Robert Aderholt, R-Haleyville, chairs the committee, which oversees the largest non-defense spending sector of the appropriations subcommittees. Three Alabamians spoke at the public witness hearing.
Head Start
Jennifer Carroll, assistant director of children’s services at the Community Action Partnership of North Alabama, testified on the need for investment in Head Start, which served over 750,000 children and families nationwide last year, including about 1,600 children in north Alabama.
“Head Start is a lifeline for families seeking to achieve the American dream,” Carroll said.
Carroll’s testimony came just days before a USA Today report revealed Head Start, the federally funded program that provides early childhood education and nutrition assistance to low-income children and families, could be on the chopping block.
Having worked with Head Start for 25 years, Carroll said the nation’s most vulnerable children and families deserve services that help set them on a path for economic mobility.
“If our federal money is cut, not only are the services cut to children and families, but they’re cut to those vendors and their families, so it’s just an issue that could perpetuate other loss of economic stability in our communities,” Carroll told Alabama Daily News last week.
The Head Start program in north Alabama has 426 employees and invested more than $32 million in 15 Alabama counties last year.
Speaking on behalf of the National Head Start Association, Carroll said the federally funded program is requesting nearly $15 billion in federal funds for next year, including a 3.2% cost-of-living adjustment to support its workforce.
“Not receiving a (cost of living adjustment) for Head Start just means that we are unable to pass that cost of living adjustment onto our staff, so we’re not able to compete with other programs that pay higher wages, whether that’s the public school system or a factory,” Carroll told ADN.
Head Start has faced challenges since the beginning of Trump’s second term, including programs experiencing delays in accessing grant funds earlier this year, according to the National Head Start Association. Carroll said North Alabama did not experience those problems. Five regional Head Start offices are closing as part of efforts to shrink the Department of Health and Human Services.
State health departments
Some federal funding for state health departments, including the Alabama Department of Public Health, has also been upended under the Trump administration.
Dr. Scott Harris, Alabama state health officer, representing the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials during last week’s hearing, said Alabama receives about 70% of its funds from federal sources, with some states receiving up to 80%.
“In my state, without these federal dollars, over half a million children would not have access to routine vaccinations,” Harris said. “And this is at a time when we’re seeing outbreaks and deaths from diseases like measles and whooping cough. Thousands of women in Alabama would not have the ability to have pap smears or mammograms without the federal income that we have.”
More than $11 billion in DHHS federal grants allocated to state health departments to address COVID-19 and other disease outbreaks were abruptly halted last month, including about $190 million for ADPH. Harris said health leaders were “shocked” by the sudden loss.
“They weren’t just COVID dollars,” Harris said. “They were approved to be used for many other things, such as measles testing, bioterrorism threat preparedness, protecting communities, (and) supporting our local hospitals. The abrupt loss of those funds will stop essential work.”
After 23 mostly Democratic-led states and the District of Columbia sued over the cuts, a federal judge temporarily blocked the move. Alabama is not involved in that case.
Harris said ADPH had planned for the now-lost federal grants to end in about 15 months, not overnight. He said that money went toward infection control training and tracking disease outbreaks.
“We work with hospitals on submitting data to us on outbreaks and on certain types of infections that we need timely information on, and we don’t have the ability to continue funding that,” Harris told ADN last week.
“We work in independent living centers with intellectually disabled and developmentally disabled adults… and do work to make their space safer and do training and education for staff in those homes, and that program is going to go away.”
Harris said ADPH is still responsible for that work, but the cuts make it “very challenging.” The grant cuts will affect about 200 people whose salaries are at least partially funded by the federal money, Harris said.
“Our team’s been working really hard to try to figure out what that means, ” Harris told ADN. “We have some other positions in the department where people can go or transfer to, and there are other sources of revenue that we can try to transfer people to, but it won’t cover everyone, and so there’s a lot of important work there.”
In his testimony, Harris also asked Congress and top administration officials to involve health care stakeholders in conversations about the impact of funding cuts and administrative changes. He said the hearing was a good opportunity to express the needs of health departments.
“These funding cuts really impact real people’s lives in Alabama… every day,” Harris told ADN.
Aderholt said it was important to hear the leaders’ perspectives as Congress moves through the appropriations process.
“Obviously, we want to try to make sure we protect those programs that are very helpful to people, and we need to know how it impacts our state and districts,” Aderholt told ADN.
Alabama Poison Information Center Clinical Director Jessica Pescatore also spoke at the hearing, representing America’s Poison Centers.