WASHINGTON — The Alabama Department of Public Health is facing a loss of more than $214 million in federal grant funding due to new cuts from Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency.
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’s largest cut to ADPH was for $188.4 million in COVID-19-related funding, according to a list of terminated grants nationwide.
The terminated grant provided funding to state and local health departments across the country to “detect, prevent and respond to infectious disease outbreaks,” according to the CDC website. The nearly $190 million represents funding that had not yet been paid out. The grants were cut last Monday, according to the HHS list. The ADPH had expected the grant to continue until mid-2026.
U.S. Rep. Terri Sewell, D-Birmingham, criticized that cut in a post on X last week, noting that grant went beyond COVID-19 response.
“…What this means is that investigations of outbreaks in prisons and nursing homes and daycare centers are going to go without personnel to actually do those investigations,” Sewell said on X.
The ADPH is also losing a little more than $11 million for a grant to address health disparities among minority and rural populations, according to the HHS list.
Nearly $15 million in federal funding for ADPH earmarked for vaccinating children was also cut. Much of that money went directly to community-level organizations.
The grants to ADPH came through the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which is under HHS and is terminating $11.4 billion total in funds, NBC News first reported. The Department of Health and Human Services is also reducing its workforce by 20,000 employees, according to a press release.
“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,” HHS Director of Communications Andrew Nixon said in a statement to NBC News last week.
U.S. Sen. Katie Britt, R-Ala., told Alabama Daily News that she would be happy to look into the specifics of the Alabama cuts, and said, “obviously I think the pandemic is over, and so that money was originally allocated to help with that.”
Sewell said the grant cuts would impact 140 jobs at the health department.
“The department has not yet determined the full effect of this cut in funding,” ADPH said in a statement to Alabama Daily News on Monday. “We always knew that these grants would end at some point, but it is the sudden nature that has been difficult for us to manage. We are looking at other places in the department for these employees who have lost their funding streams.”
Rep. Shomari Figures, D-Mobile, said the “stupidity continues” referring to the cuts to ADPH in a post on X.
The Alabama Department of Mental Health is also losing five block grants. In total, those grants add up to a loss of more than $22.5 million. Two of the grants are substance use block grants from the American Rescue Plan, one is a mental health block grant from American Rescue Plan funds, and the other two were mental health block grants from COVID-19 Relief funds.
A comment from ADMH wasn’t available Monday.
The HHS list of terminated grants also includes four grants for the University of Alabama at Birmingham. Two of those NIH grants were cut earlier in March targeting LGBTQ+ research studies. The third terminated grant for UAB is the ADVANCE SGM Health for Research Diversity grant aimed at supporting researchers who can advance “sexual and gender minority health equity in the Deep South.” The fourth grant is Adaptive Immunity and Persistent SARS-CoV-2 Replication, which studies COVID-19 in children undergoing chemotherapy.