The Trump administration’s cuts to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention funding for state and local health departments had vastly uneven effects depending on the political leanings of a state, according to a KFF Health News analysis. Democratic-led states and select blue-leaning cities fought back in court and saw money for public health efforts restored — while GOP-led states sustained big losses.
The Department of Health and Human Services in late March canceled nearly 700 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention grants nationwide — together worth about $11 billion. Awarded during the covid-19 pandemic, they supported efforts to vaccinate people, reduce health disparities among demographic groups, upgrade antiquated systems for detecting infectious disease outbreaks, and hire community health workers.
Initially, grant cancellations hit blue and red states roughly evenly. Four of the five jurisdictions with the largest number of terminated grants were led by Democrats: California, the District of Columbia, Illinois, and Massachusetts.
But after attorneys general and governors from about two dozen blue states sued in federal court and won an injunction, the balance flipped. Of the five states with the most canceled grants, four are led by Republicans: Texas, Georgia, Oklahoma, and Ohio.
In blue states, nearly 80% of the CDC grant cuts have been restored, compared with fewer than 5% in red states, according to the KFF Health News analysis. Grant amounts reported in an HHS database known as the Tracking Accountability in Government Grants System, or TAGGS, often don’t match what states confirmed. Instead, this analysis focused on the number of grants.
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Federal CDC funding accounts for more than half of state and local health department budgets, according to KFF, a health information nonprofit that includes KFF Health News. States that President Donald Trump won in the 2024 election received a higher share of the $15 billion the cCDC allocated in fiscal 2023 than those that Democrat Kamala Harris won, according to KFF.
The Trump administration’s nationwide CDC grant terminations reflect this. More than half were in states that Trump won in 2024, totaling at least 370 terminations before the court action, according to KFF Health News’ analysis.
The Columbus, Ohio, health department had received $6.2 million in CDC grants, but roughly half of it — $3 million — disappeared with the Trump cuts. The city laid off 11 people who worked on investigating infectious disease outbreaks in such places as schools and nursing homes, Columbus Health Commissioner Mysheika Roberts said.
She also said the city had planned to buy a new electronic health record system for easier access to patients’ hospital records — which could improve disease detection and provide better treatment for those infected — but that was put on ice.
“We’ve never had a grant midcycle just get pulled from us for no reason,” Roberts said. “This sense of uncertainty is stressful.”
Columbus did not receive its money directly from the CDC. Rather, the state gave the city some funds it received from the federal government. Ohio, led by Republican Gov. Mike DeWine and a Republican attorney general, did not sue to block the funding cuts.
Columbus sued the federal government in April to keep its money, along with other Democratic-led municipalities in Republican-governed states: Harris County, Texas, home to Houston; the Metropolitan Government of Nashville and Davidson County in Tennessee; and Kansas City, Missouri. A federal judge in June blocked those cuts.
See here for some background on that lawsuit. It was one of many that Harris County engaged in, some of which have already been resolved in our favor. According to the story, Columbus is still waiting for its funds to be restored (the lawsuit was resolved in late June), so the matter is still in progress and that may be true for Harris County as well. But fighting was clearly the right thing to do, and it’s a lesson everyone should have learned by now.