Latest news with #DefendtheSpend
CNN
25-07-2025
- Health
- CNN
States, cities face loss of vaccination programs and staff after ‘baffling' cuts to federal funding
Millions of dollars have been pulled from state and local vaccination programs with no explanation, after a review of the funding agreements by the US Department of Health and Human Services. Affected programs say they will probably have to cut staffers and services because of the shortfall, and they worry that vaccination rates will also drop as they lose the ability to assist people who are low-income or uninsured. Immunization programs across the country are already struggling to address an increase in vaccine-preventable diseases. These include pertussis – also known as whooping cough – which has sickened more than 10,000 Americans and killed five children this year, as well as a smoldering outbreak of measles that has killed three people in the US and threatens to end the country's elimination status. 'That's the baffling part,' said one policy expert who spoke to CNN on the condition that they not be named for fear of government retaliation. 'Why anyone would create this disruption in the midst of the worst measles outbreak in 30 years.' Most money spent by states on vaccination comes from the federal government. The grant money, which is appropriated by Congress under Section 317 of the Public Health Services Act, enables states, territories and some large cities to collect data on vaccination, as well as provide shots to underserved children and adults. The funds also help monitor the safety of vaccines and fight misinformation. The money is doled out in five-year grants overseen by US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the most recent awards were due to states on July 1. This year, however, HHS conducted lengthy reviews of the awards, which delayed their arrival in some cases. HHS Director of Communications Andrew Nixon said the reviews were part of agency cost-cutting efforts. 'The Defend the Spend initiative is a department-wide effort to ensure that taxpayer dollars are being used effectively, transparently, and in alignment with this administration,' Nixon said in a statement to CNN. 'As part of this oversight, grant recipients may be asked to provide additional information, which is essential to preventing waste, fraud, and abuse. HHS is committed to working all grantees to resolve outstanding issues as quickly as possible while maintaining the highest standards of accountability.' Public health advocates say the latest funding cuts appear to be part of a larger pattern of efforts by HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to disrupt and dismantle the America's vaccination infrastructure. 'Millions of children missed their routine vaccinations during the pandemic,' and never caught back up said Dr. Caitlin Rivers, director of the Center for Response Outbreak Innovation at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Vaccine hesitancy has also increased, driven by a deluge of misinformation, some of it now coming from official channels. As a result, vaccination rates have dropped, and some communities are no longer protected by herd immunity, the threshold of vaccination required to prevent certain infectious diseases from easily spreading. If state vaccination programs are not adequately resourced, 'we're just going to continue to fall further and further behind, and that sets the stage for things like measles and pertussis outbreaks, which we're seeing,' Rivers said. Public health programs often become victims of their own success, she said. 'When there is a large public health emergency … there are huge investments made in public health, because we can see very clearly what the consequences are of having inadequate resourcing and inadequate infrastructure. But over time, those investments begin to work, and the threats recede, and we start to forget why it's so important to maintain those defenses,' Rivers said. 'And I think now, five years out of Covid, we're very clearly in the neglect cycle, and we're seeing a lot of the investments we made during the pandemic be pulled back,' she added. Of 66 jurisdictions awarded federal immunization funding this year, about 40 received awards lower than their funding targets. And more than a dozen states and cities received lower awards this year than they did in 2019, just before the Covid-19 pandemic began, the last time these awards were offered through the CDC, according to a CNN analysis of federal data. Massachusetts, New York, Indiana, California and Arizona were among those awarded less this year than in 2019, the year before the Covid-19 pandemic began. 'That's really, really unbelievable to us,' said one public health advocate who asked not to be named for fear of political retaliation for speaking out against the cuts. 'How could we come out of a pandemic with half of states being less prepared?' Other states found that their awards were far lower than they'd been told to expect. In January 2025, the CDC sent out a Notice of Funding Opportunity – essentially an invitation – to states, territories and certain large cities. It came with a funding target: the amount they could expect if their grant proposals were accepted. Washington, for example, was told it could expect about $9.5 million, so the Department of Health planned for that amount for the 2026 fiscal year. When the state got its Notice of Award on July 1, however, it was for $7.8 million, an 18% reduction. Massachusetts was told it could expect $7.7 million for the upcoming fiscal year, already a 20% reduction from its 2025 budget. When the award arrived, it was $1 million under the targeted amount, at $6.7 million, which means the department expects to operate with about 30% less funding next year than it has this year. Colorado received almost $500,000 less than it expected, a decrease of about 5% from the amount it budgeted for, according to federal data California, Illinois, Michigan and New York also received lower-than-expected funding awards, according to a CNN analysis of federal data. Sometimes, the delays and errors in funding caused chaos: At least one state, Idaho, furloughed its immunization program staff with no notice after the money didn't arrive when expected. When the award did come through a day later, they were put back to work, but medical providers who reached out in the interim to submit their regular data updates had no one to help them and didn't know when services would be restored. The cuts didn't just affect state health departments. The city of New Haven, Connecticut, had to lay off immunization positions that were supported by subawards it receives from the state grant. When the grant didn't arrive in time, the state directed the city not to incur any more expenses, and when the federal money did come through, it was 20% less than anticipated. Chicago is also preparing to lay off immunization workers, according to multiple sources with knowledge of the city's plans, who asked not to be named because they feared retaliation by the Trump administration. Not all awardees saw reductions, however. About two dozen jurisdictions, including Alabama, Idaho and Wyoming and Montana, got significant funding increases over their award targets for this year. State officials who spoke to CNN for this story say they were given no explanation for why the awards were reduced or increased this cycle. The cuts come on top of the loss of billions in unspent Covid relief funding that was being used by states, in part, to help staff immunization programs. In late March, HHS directed the CDC to roll back about $11.4 billion in Covid-era funding granted to state and local health departments. Another $1 billion was reclaimed from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. A survey conducted by the Association of Immunization Managers found that the Covid money clawback alone has led to the elimination 579 staff positions in state vaccination programs. After the new grant cuts, some jurisdictions said they would probably need to lay off even more workers but were trying to assess the changes that would be needed. Some programs said they hoped state funding could help fill the gaps. In the past, the funding amounts that jurisdictions were told they could expect have been determined by a relatively simple formula that primarily relied on an area's population. This year, however, federal officials deployed a more complicated formula that took into account population levels as well as how much of a state was rural and how many providers participate in the Vaccines for Children program compared with the overall population, according to a public health advocate familiar with the awards who asked not to be named for fear of political retaliation. Immunization programs were told they could expect about $418 million in funding. All told, what they were awarded totaled roughly $398 million. Changes to the funding formula don't appear to account for the reductions, however. The formula was applied to the target amounts that were distributed in January. Instead, changes to the awards came after the HHS review, which in some cases delayed the release of the money and left programs hanging. Hawaii, for example, received authorization to borrow up to $100,000 from the state government to pay salaries and cover operational expenses until its award came through, about two weeks late. Public health advocates blasted the funding decision. 'Stripping 317 waiver funds combined with other losses is starving state and local public health budgets and is not just short-sighted, it's reckless,' said Dr. Brian Castrucci, president and chief executive officer of the nonprofit deBeaumont Foundation, which advocates for the public health workforce. 'We're watching the deliberate dismantling of the public health safety net in real time,' Castrucci said.
CNN
25-07-2025
- Health
- CNN
States, cities face loss of vaccination programs and staff after ‘baffling' cuts to federal funding
Vaccines Federal agencies Children's healthFacebookTweetLink Follow Millions of dollars have been pulled from state and local vaccination programs with no explanation, after a review of the funding agreements by the US Department of Health and Human Services. Affected programs say they will probably have to cut staffers and services because of the shortfall, and they worry that vaccination rates will also drop as they lose the ability to assist people who are low-income or uninsured. Immunization programs across the country are already struggling to address an increase in vaccine-preventable diseases. These include pertussis – also known as whooping cough – which has sickened more than 10,000 Americans and killed five children this year, as well as a smoldering outbreak of measles that has killed three people in the US and threatens to end the country's elimination status. 'That's the baffling part,' said one policy expert who spoke to CNN on the condition that they not be named for fear of government retaliation. 'Why anyone would create this disruption in the midst of the worst measles outbreak in 30 years.' Most money spent by states on vaccination comes from the federal government. The grant money, which is appropriated by Congress under Section 317 of the Public Health Services Act, enables states, territories and some large cities to collect data on vaccination, as well as provide shots to underserved children and adults. The funds also help monitor the safety of vaccines and fight misinformation. The money is doled out in five-year grants overseen by US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the most recent awards were due to states on July 1. This year, however, HHS conducted lengthy reviews of the awards, which delayed their arrival in some cases. HHS Director of Communications Andrew Nixon said the reviews were part of agency cost-cutting efforts. 'The Defend the Spend initiative is a department-wide effort to ensure that taxpayer dollars are being used effectively, transparently, and in alignment with this administration,' Nixon said in a statement to CNN. 'As part of this oversight, grant recipients may be asked to provide additional information, which is essential to preventing waste, fraud, and abuse. HHS is committed to working all grantees to resolve outstanding issues as quickly as possible while maintaining the highest standards of accountability.' Public health advocates say the latest funding cuts appear to be part of a larger pattern of efforts by HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to disrupt and dismantle the America's vaccination infrastructure. 'Millions of children missed their routine vaccinations during the pandemic,' and never caught back up said Dr. Caitlin Rivers, director of the Center for Response Outbreak Innovation at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Vaccine hesitancy has also increased, driven by a deluge of misinformation, some of it now coming from official channels. As a result, vaccination rates have dropped, and some communities are no longer protected by herd immunity, the threshold of vaccination required to prevent certain infectious diseases from easily spreading. If state vaccination programs are not adequately resourced, 'we're just going to continue to fall further and further behind, and that sets the stage for things like measles and pertussis outbreaks, which we're seeing,' Rivers said. Public health programs often become victims of their own success, she said. 'When there is a large public health emergency … there are huge investments made in public health, because we can see very clearly what the consequences are of having inadequate resourcing and inadequate infrastructure. But over time, those investments begin to work, and the threats recede, and we start to forget why it's so important to maintain those defenses,' Rivers said. 'And I think now, five years out of Covid, we're very clearly in the neglect cycle, and we're seeing a lot of the investments we made during the pandemic be pulled back,' she added. Of 66 jurisdictions awarded federal immunization funding this year, about 40 received awards lower than their funding targets. And more than a dozen states and cities received lower awards this year than they did in 2019, just before the Covid-19 pandemic began, the last time these awards were offered through the CDC, according to a CNN analysis of federal data. Massachusetts, New York, Indiana, California and Arizona were among those awarded less this year than in 2019, the year before the Covid-19 pandemic began. 'That's really, really unbelievable to us,' said one public health advocate who asked not to be named for fear of political retaliation for speaking out against the cuts. 'How could we come out of a pandemic with half of states being less prepared?' Other states found that their awards were far lower than they'd been told to expect. In January 2025, the CDC sent out a Notice of Funding Opportunity – essentially an invitation – to states, territories and certain large cities. It came with a funding target: the amount they could expect if their grant proposals were accepted. Washington, for example, was told it could expect about $9.5 million, so the Department of Health planned for that amount for the 2026 fiscal year. When the state got its Notice of Award on July 1, however, it was for $7.8 million, an 18% reduction. Massachusetts was told it could expect $7.7 million for the upcoming fiscal year, already a 20% reduction from its 2025 budget. When the award arrived, it was $1 million under the targeted amount, at $6.7 million, which means the department expects to operate with about 30% less funding next year than it has this year. Colorado received almost $500,000 less than it expected, a decrease of about 5% from the amount it budgeted for, according to federal data California, Illinois, Michigan and New York also received lower-than-expected funding awards, according to a CNN analysis of federal data. Sometimes, the delays and errors in funding caused chaos: At least one state, Idaho, furloughed its immunization program staff with no notice after the money didn't arrive when expected. When the award did come through a day later, they were put back to work, but medical providers who reached out in the interim to submit their regular data updates had no one to help them and didn't know when services would be restored. The cuts didn't just affect state health departments. The city of New Haven, Connecticut, had to lay off immunization positions that were supported by subawards it receives from the state grant. When the grant didn't arrive in time, the state directed the city not to incur any more expenses, and when the federal money did come through, it was 20% less than anticipated. Chicago is also preparing to lay off immunization workers, according to multiple sources with knowledge of the city's plans, who asked not to be named because they feared retaliation by the Trump administration. Not all awardees saw reductions, however. About two dozen jurisdictions, including Alabama, Idaho and Wyoming and Montana, got significant funding increases over their award targets for this year. State officials who spoke to CNN for this story say they were given no explanation for why the awards were reduced or increased this cycle. The cuts come on top of the loss of billions in unspent Covid relief funding that was being used by states, in part, to help staff immunization programs. In late March, HHS directed the CDC to roll back about $11.4 billion in Covid-era funding granted to state and local health departments. Another $1 billion was reclaimed from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. A survey conducted by the Association of Immunization Managers found that the Covid money clawback alone has led to the elimination 579 staff positions in state vaccination programs. After the new grant cuts, some jurisdictions said they would probably need to lay off even more workers but were trying to assess the changes that would be needed. Some programs said they hoped state funding could help fill the gaps. In the past, the funding amounts that jurisdictions were told they could expect have been determined by a relatively simple formula that primarily relied on an area's population. This year, however, federal officials deployed a more complicated formula that took into account population levels as well as how much of a state was rural and how many providers participate in the Vaccines for Children program compared with the overall population, according to a public health advocate familiar with the awards who asked not to be named for fear of political retaliation. Immunization programs were told they could expect about $418 million in funding. All told, what they were awarded totaled roughly $398 million. Changes to the funding formula don't appear to account for the reductions, however. The formula was applied to the target amounts that were distributed in January. Instead, changes to the awards came after the HHS review, which in some cases delayed the release of the money and left programs hanging. Hawaii, for example, received authorization to borrow up to $100,000 from the state government to pay salaries and cover operational expenses until its award came through, about two weeks late. Public health advocates blasted the funding decision. 'Stripping 317 waiver funds combined with other losses is starving state and local public health budgets and is not just short-sighted, it's reckless,' said Dr. Brian Castrucci, president and chief executive officer of the nonprofit deBeaumont Foundation, which advocates for the public health workforce. 'We're watching the deliberate dismantling of the public health safety net in real time,' Castrucci said.
CNN
25-07-2025
- Health
- CNN
States, cities face loss of vaccination programs and staff after ‘baffling' cuts to federal funding
Millions of dollars have been pulled from state and local vaccination programs with no explanation, after a review of the funding agreements by the US Department of Health and Human Services. Affected programs say they will probably have to cut staffers and services because of the shortfall, and they worry that vaccination rates will also drop as they lose the ability to assist people who are low-income or uninsured. Immunization programs across the country are already struggling to address an increase in vaccine-preventable diseases. These include pertussis – also known as whooping cough – which has sickened more than 10,000 Americans and killed five children this year, as well as a smoldering outbreak of measles that has killed three people in the US and threatens to end the country's elimination status. 'That's the baffling part,' said one policy expert who spoke to CNN on the condition that they not be named for fear of government retaliation. 'Why anyone would create this disruption in the midst of the worst measles outbreak in 30 years.' Most money spent by states on vaccination comes from the federal government. The grant money, which is appropriated by Congress under Section 317 of the Public Health Services Act, enables states, territories and some large cities to collect data on vaccination, as well as provide shots to underserved children and adults. The funds also help monitor the safety of vaccines and fight misinformation. The money is doled out in five-year grants overseen by US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the most recent awards were due to states on July 1. This year, however, HHS conducted lengthy reviews of the awards, which delayed their arrival in some cases. HHS Director of Communications Andrew Nixon said the reviews were part of agency cost-cutting efforts. 'The Defend the Spend initiative is a department-wide effort to ensure that taxpayer dollars are being used effectively, transparently, and in alignment with this administration,' Nixon said in a statement to CNN. 'As part of this oversight, grant recipients may be asked to provide additional information, which is essential to preventing waste, fraud, and abuse. HHS is committed to working all grantees to resolve outstanding issues as quickly as possible while maintaining the highest standards of accountability.' Public health advocates say the latest funding cuts appear to be part of a larger pattern of efforts by HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to disrupt and dismantle the America's vaccination infrastructure. 'Millions of children missed their routine vaccinations during the pandemic,' and never caught back up said Dr. Caitlin Rivers, director of the Center for Response Outbreak Innovation at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Vaccine hesitancy has also increased, driven by a deluge of misinformation, some of it now coming from official channels. As a result, vaccination rates have dropped, and some communities are no longer protected by herd immunity, the threshold of vaccination required to prevent certain infectious diseases from easily spreading. If state vaccination programs are not adequately resourced, 'we're just going to continue to fall further and further behind, and that sets the stage for things like measles and pertussis outbreaks, which we're seeing,' Rivers said. Public health programs often become victims of their own success, she said. 'When there is a large public health emergency … there are huge investments made in public health, because we can see very clearly what the consequences are of having inadequate resourcing and inadequate infrastructure. But over time, those investments begin to work, and the threats recede, and we start to forget why it's so important to maintain those defenses,' Rivers said. 'And I think now, five years out of Covid, we're very clearly in the neglect cycle, and we're seeing a lot of the investments we made during the pandemic be pulled back,' she added. Of 66 jurisdictions awarded federal immunization funding this year, about 40 received awards lower than their funding targets. And more than a dozen states and cities received lower awards this year than they did in 2019, just before the Covid-19 pandemic began, the last time these awards were offered through the CDC, according to a CNN analysis of federal data. Massachusetts, New York, Indiana, California and Arizona were among those awarded less this year than in 2019, the year before the Covid-19 pandemic began. 'That's really, really unbelievable to us,' said one public health advocate who asked not to be named for fear of political retaliation for speaking out against the cuts. 'How could we come out of a pandemic with half of states being less prepared?' Other states found that their awards were far lower than they'd been told to expect. In January 2025, the CDC sent out a Notice of Funding Opportunity – essentially an invitation – to states, territories and certain large cities. It came with a funding target: the amount they could expect if their grant proposals were accepted. Washington, for example, was told it could expect about $9.5 million, so the Department of Health planned for that amount for the 2026 fiscal year. When the state got its Notice of Award on July 1, however, it was for $7.8 million, an 18% reduction. Massachusetts was told it could expect $7.7 million for the upcoming fiscal year, already a 20% reduction from its 2025 budget. When the award arrived, it was $1 million under the targeted amount, at $6.7 million, which means the department expects to operate with about 30% less funding next year than it has this year. Colorado received almost $500,000 less than it expected, a decrease of about 5% from the amount it budgeted for, according to federal data California, Illinois, Michigan and New York also received lower-than-expected funding awards, according to a CNN analysis of federal data. Sometimes, the delays and errors in funding caused chaos: At least one state, Idaho, furloughed its immunization program staff with no notice after the money didn't arrive when expected. When the award did come through a day later, they were put back to work, but medical providers who reached out in the interim to submit their regular data updates had no one to help them and didn't know when services would be restored. The cuts didn't just affect state health departments. The city of New Haven, Connecticut, had to lay off immunization positions that were supported by subawards it receives from the state grant. When the grant didn't arrive in time, the state directed the city not to incur any more expenses, and when the federal money did come through, it was 20% less than anticipated. Chicago is also preparing to lay off immunization workers, according to multiple sources with knowledge of the city's plans, who asked not to be named because they feared retaliation by the Trump administration. Not all awardees saw reductions, however. About two dozen jurisdictions, including Alabama, Idaho and Wyoming and Montana, got significant funding increases over their award targets for this year. State officials who spoke to CNN for this story say they were given no explanation for why the awards were reduced or increased this cycle. The cuts come on top of the loss of billions in unspent Covid relief funding that was being used by states, in part, to help staff immunization programs. In late March, HHS directed the CDC to roll back about $11.4 billion in Covid-era funding granted to state and local health departments. Another $1 billion was reclaimed from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. A survey conducted by the Association of Immunization Managers found that the Covid money clawback alone has led to the elimination 579 staff positions in state vaccination programs. After the new grant cuts, some jurisdictions said they would probably need to lay off even more workers but were trying to assess the changes that would be needed. Some programs said they hoped state funding could help fill the gaps. In the past, the funding amounts that jurisdictions were told they could expect have been determined by a relatively simple formula that primarily relied on an area's population. This year, however, federal officials deployed a more complicated formula that took into account population levels as well as how much of a state was rural and how many providers participate in the Vaccines for Children program compared with the overall population, according to a public health advocate familiar with the awards who asked not to be named for fear of political retaliation. Immunization programs were told they could expect about $418 million in funding. All told, what they were awarded totaled roughly $398 million. Changes to the funding formula don't appear to account for the reductions, however. The formula was applied to the target amounts that were distributed in January. Instead, changes to the awards came after the HHS review, which in some cases delayed the release of the money and left programs hanging. Hawaii, for example, received authorization to borrow up to $100,000 from the state government to pay salaries and cover operational expenses until its award came through, about two weeks late. Public health advocates blasted the funding decision. 'Stripping 317 waiver funds combined with other losses is starving state and local public health budgets and is not just short-sighted, it's reckless,' said Dr. Brian Castrucci, president and chief executive officer of the nonprofit deBeaumont Foundation, which advocates for the public health workforce. 'We're watching the deliberate dismantling of the public health safety net in real time,' Castrucci said.
Yahoo
18-04-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
DOGE begins to freeze health-care payments for extra review
The U.S. DOGE Service is putting new curbs on billions of dollars in federal health-care grants, requiring government officials to manually review and approve previously routine payments - and paralyzing grant awards to tens of thousands of organizations, according to 12 people familiar with the new arrangements. The effort, which DOGE has dubbed 'Defend the Spend,' has left thousands of payments backed up, including funding for doctors' and nurses' salaries at federal health centers for the poor. Some grantees are waiting on payments they expected last week. Subscribe to The Post Most newsletter for the most important and interesting stories from The Washington Post. The Trump administration is pushing to cut federal spending and crack down on grants that political officials say conflict with White House priorities. DOGE, which stands for the Department of Government Efficiency, said the new initiative, which is being rolled out across parts of the Department of Health and Human Services, will force grantees and officials to justify spending and create transparency. 'Thanks to the great work by @HHSGov, for the first time ever, the American people will be able to see line-by-line payment descriptions & justifications - coming soon to the DOGE website,' the group posted on X last Saturday. Typically, an organization that has been awarded a grant does not receive the funding up front. The money is held in a secure account managed by the government, and an organization will request 'drawdowns' - tranches of money periodically throughout the year - to cover expenses such as salaries or research costs. Under Defend the Spend, organizations must now include a justification for each transaction. Federal officials then review the justification before deciding whether to approve the payment. The process has been abruptly instituted at the National Institutes for Health, the Administration for Children and Families, and other parts of HHS, with inconsistent instructions on how to proceed, said the people familiar with the arrangements, who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity because of fear of reprisal. They also described immediate backlogs in processing payments. HHS said in a statement that the DOGE effort would not threaten 'support for critical programs' and was intended to root out fraud and abuse. 'The era of rubber stamping is over,' the HHS statement said. Current and former federal officials said the process would create bottlenecks. 'Instead of cutting red tape, they are strangling grantees with it,' said Robert Gordon, who served as the HHS assistant secretary of financial resources during the Biden administration. Some officials have been told that only Trump political appointees can sign requests to disburse funds, even if a career official has already approved it, adding an additional layer of review. The justification for each payment also must include an explanation of how the money will be used to advance Trump administration priorities, according to two employees in separate agencies who received high-level briefings on the process. Federal officials also have been instructed to use a website run by DOGE to approve grant payments, according to an email sent by defendthespend@ and obtained by The Washington Post. NIH officials on Thursday were still determining who would approve grant payments at their agency and did not expect to finalize the process until next week, two NIH officials said. Some outside organizations have been told their delayed payments are 'in transit,' but several federal officials said that is not true. It is unclear whether all the federal health-care grants will be approved and when. 'All funding is on hold,' an NIH official told colleagues at a meeting on Thursday, according to audio obtained by The Post. 'The bottom line is no one is getting any money right now. But they don't know they're not getting any money because it just says that it's 'in transit.'' In the first months of the Trump administration, government officials have taken multiple steps to delay or halt federal grants. Those include slow-walking billions of dollars in research grants issued by agencies such as the NIH, and freezing or terminating grants to higher-education institutions, on the grounds that the universities did too little to combat antisemitism on campus, did too much to support transgender athletes or for other, indeterminate reasons. DOGE engineers also recently inserted themselves into the government's long-established process to alert the public about potential federal grants and allow organizations to apply for funds. The group - which is backed by billionaire Elon Musk and stocked with young engineers and Musk allies - has said it is focused on cutting wasteful spending and making the government more efficient. But the new initiative is creating holdups, staffers who award grants at the health agencies said in interviews. They described a hurried, uncertain process to roll out Defend the Spend, which involves fields added to Payment Management Services, a centralized system that processed nearly 500,000 transactions and more than $850 billion in payments last year. A DOGE engineer was given access to the system on Jan. 22 and was made an administrator, according to a Trump administration court filing last month. At a meeting of grants management staff Wednesday, NIH officials explained that DOGE's process was instituted the previous Friday and that they would halt all payments until they had been through an extra layer of review, according to an NIH staffer. The freeze had been put in place without any sort of formal announcement, leaving thousands of payment requests backed up and confusing organizations waiting for federal funds. Catholic Charities of Fort Worth last week referred to the new requirements in a court filing that is part of its lawsuit against the Trump administration, saying it was 'concerned' by the requests for additional information before drawing down funds. Catholic Charities of Fort Worth did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Another grantee said they had requested funds in the last week but hadn't received them. An unsigned email told them to reach out to the agency. 'The payments are going through extra review,' the email said. Until this month, grantees had to provide progress reports and quarterly reports for federal review, but government staffers did not examine every single 'drawdown' of funds requested, said one HHS employee. Thousands of such 'drawdowns' take place every day, the employee said. The DOGE system has imposed an extreme workload on government staff, the employee said. Among those immediately suffering consequences are federal health centers, which provide services for low-income people and those who lack insurance, the employee said. Those centers rely on regular drawdowns for their operational expenses, such as doctors' and nurses' salaries and basic medical supplies. If the funding delay continues much longer, the situation will grow dire for such centers, imperiling their ability to assist the poor, the employee said. 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Washington Post
17-04-2025
- Business
- Washington Post
DOGE begins to freeze health-care payments for extra review
The U.S. DOGE Service is putting new curbs on billions of dollars in federal health-care grants, requiring government officials to manually review and approve previously routine payments — and paralyzing grant awards to tens of thousands of organizations, according to 12 people familiar with the new arrangements. The effort, which DOGE has dubbed 'Defend the Spend,' has left thousands of payments backed up, including funding for doctors' and nurses' salaries at federal health centers for the poor. Some grantees are waiting on payments they expected last week.
