CDC to slash infectious-disease funding for states; California impact uncertain

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has notified the California Department of Public Health it is suspending grants it had provided to support the state’s infectious-disease response during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The directive was sent to all 50 states and will cancel roughly $12 billion in funding. California officials said they couldn’t immediately say how the cuts would affect state services.

“We are working to evaluate the impact of these actions,” Erica Pan, the state department’s director and state public health officer, said in a statement.

The funding was awarded during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic to aid the state with its respiratory virus monitoring, testing and response, immunizations and vaccines for children, and to help address health disparities, Pan said.

The cuts were reported earlier by NBC News, which quoted a statement from U.S. Department of Health and Human Services spokesman Andrew Nixon saying that the “COVID-19 pandemic is over, and H.H.S. will no longer waste billions of taxpayer dollars responding to a nonexistent pandemic that Americans moved on from years ago.”

It is unclear how much funding the state had been awarded and how much is now being pulled, but a 2023 news release shows that the CDC awarded the state a $37-million grant to help strengthen the state’s health infrastructure, workforce and data systems.

According to the release, the grant award’s start date was Dec. 1, 2022, and was set to last through Nov. 30, 2027.

It couldn’t immediately be determined how much of the award has already been spent, but much of it was designated to support county health departments, including the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health, Riverside County Department of Public Health, Long Beach Health Department, Orange County Health Department and San Bernardino County Department of Public Health.

In addition, two other large awards were provided by the CDC to California in the immediate wake of the COVID pandemic: a $555-million grant during 2020 and $1.7 billion as part of the Coronavirus Response and Relief Supplemental Appropriations Act of 2021.

The state Department of Public Health didn’t immediately respond for a request for comment on what programs could be affected by the CDC’s cancellation of funding, nor how the state’s infectious-disease monitoring, testing, response and immunization programs could be affected.

The Los Angeles County Department of Public Health received notices from the federal government that COVID-associated funding was going to be rescinded, a spokeswoman for the department said. It also received an informal notice from the state that COVID-related grants for vaccination services probably would be terminated.

“In total, these actions to rescind … COVID-associated funding will impact more than $45 million in core L.A. County Public Health funding,” the spokeswoman said. “Much of this funding supports disease surveillance, public health lab services, outbreak investigations, infection control activities at healthcare facilities, and data transparency. We are working to determine the impacts of the announcement of the loss of this funding.”

According to 2025-26 state budget figures, Gov. Gavin Newsom allocated $5.1 billion to the state’s health department; about $2.3 billion of that comes from federal funding.

Although Congress initially authorized the money for state health programs as part of its COVID relief bills, it has since been allowed to be targeted to other programs, such as testing and surveillance for other respiratory viruses.

California has been ground zero for the H5N1 bird flu since last March. Thirty-eight people in the state have been infected with the virus, most of them dairy workers who were exposed working with infected cows or milk. However, two of the people were children; the cause of their infection has not been determined.

The virus has also infected 756 dairy herds; more than 75% of the state’s total dairy herds.

In addition, there have been eight measles cases since the beginning of the year, in addition to thousands of seasonal flu, COVID-19, norovirus and RSV cases.

Pan said the state will continue to advance public health and work to protect people.

“All Californians deserve to live in healthy and thriving communities, which is the role of public health,” she wrote in her statement, saying her department is “committed to seeking the resources required to support the critical, lifesaving infrastructure needed to keep people healthy and protect them against infectious disease, vaccine-preventable diseases and health emergencies.”