By Kanishka Singh
WASHINGTON (Reuters) -The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services canceled more than $11 billion in federal grants to states that were allocated during the COVID-19 pandemic, the federal department and state officials said on Wednesday.
The grants were being used for tracking mental health services, addiction treatment and other urgent health issues, the office of Democratic Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey said in a statement.
It said that the administration of Republican President Donald Trump sent notices to state departments of health about the “sudden termination” of multiple federal public health infrastructure grants.
“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 is prioritizing funding projects that will deliver on President Trump’s mandate to address our chronic disease epidemic,” the federal health department said in a statement to media.
The New York Times reported that notices started going out on Monday to state health departments to inform them that funds allocated during the COVID-19 pandemic were terminated.
“No additional activities can be conducted, and no additional costs may be incurred, as it relates to these funds,” the notices said, according to the newspaper.
Public health officials in Lubbock, Texas, received orders to stop work supported by three grants that helped fund the response to the widening measles outbreak there, a spokesperson of Katherine Wells, the city’s director of public health, said.
The Trump administration, since taking office on January 20, has attempted to cut costs and dismantle many critical programs and some agencies in the name of preventing what it calls wasteful spending. Several programs have been removed and agencies gutted as a result, with tens of thousands of federal workers losing their jobs.
The federal health department is headed by vaccine critic Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has pledged to tackle chronic disease and whose nomination and confirmation to the role had raised alarm with medical experts over his views.
(Reporting by Kanishka Singh in Washington; additional reporting by Julie Steenhuysen in Chicago and Ahmed Aboulenein; Editing by Aurora Ellis)
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