Wyoming will lose around $40 million in federal COVID-era grants it’s used to track infectious diseases, provide immunizations and fight substance abuse addiction as its cuts made by President Donald Trump’s administration on Wednesday.
The Wyoming Department of Health confirmed to Cowboy State Daily that the state expects to lose more than $39 million in grant funding for its Public Health Division, and nearly $1 million for its Behavioral Health Division.
Kim Deti, a spokesperson for the department, said the funding affected includes COVID-19 related grants for immunizations, epidemiology and laboratory operations, health disparities and substance abuse prevention.
Deti also said that while this supplemental funding was created and made available as a result of the pandemic, its purposes went beyond specific pandemic response activities, such as the substance abuse prevention.
She said her agency has started notifying recipients of the grant funds and “recognize there will be some tough effects.” But she also said these grants were always supposed to be temporary and the department had already been planning for “funding transitions.” Deti said there have been various expiration dates issued and also some extensions of those dates.
“This week’s notices mean those transition plans will begin a little sooner than expected,” she said.
The grants included $38.8 million from the Centers For Disease Control and Prevention awarded in 2021 to address health disparities among populations of high-risk and underserved individuals, including racial and ethnic minority populations and rural communities in Wyoming.
Wednesday’s cuts are part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) move to cancel around $12 billion in federal grants to states that were allocated this money during the COVID-19 pandemic, the federal department and state officials said on Wednesday.
The grants were being used to track, prevent and control infectious diseases, including measles, bird flu, and COVID-19, as well as track mental health services and fund addiction treatment.
"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," the agency said in a statement.
Public health offices in Lubbock, Texas, received orders to stop work supported by three grants that helped fund the response to the growing measles outbreak there, a local spokesperson told Reuters.
Mixed Reviews
State Rep. Rachel Rodriguez-Williams, chairman of the Wyoming Freedom Caucus and the House Labor, Health and Social Services Committee, applauded the cuts.
“I applaud President Trump’s mission to properly allocate taxpayer dollars and willingness to make tough decisions,” she told Cowboy State Daily in a text. “These grants were intended to deal with the COVID-19 ‘pandemic,’ which is over. Instead of wasting money tracing and tracking the COVID-19 Health Disparities Grant, it’s time we focus our attention on chronic disease and making America healthy again.”
Health advocacy group Better Wyoming slammed the news in a statement provided to Cowboy State Daily and said they will make it harder to ensure people are getting the help they need.
“Health care in Wyoming is among the most expensive in the nation, and in rural areas, healthcare—and particularly mental healthcare—is hard to access at all,” Better Wyoming Executive Director Nate Martin said. “More than 90% of the Wyoming Department of Health’s budget is distributed to local clinics and programs. That means cuts like this result in fewer healthcare resources in our own local communities.”
Andi Summerville, executive director of the Wyoming Association of Mental Health and Substance Abuse Centers, said this grant money has been critical to helping behavioral health in Wyoming, a state that has consistently had one of the highest suicide rates in the country. The short lifespan these grants existed for, she said, should not delegitimize their value in providing value support to underfunded rural mental health resources.
“The reality is progress is needed, regardless of when we lose funding or programs get shut down,” she said. “How we mitigate the longer-term effects ends up determining how much it will cost the state down the line. In that way from both a fiscal and humanitarian perspective, it’s best for everybody to support these services.”
What’s It About?
The Trump administration has aggressively attempted to cut costs since January, dismantling and gutting many programs throughout the federal government in the name of what it calls preventing wasteful spending.
The Trump administration ended more than $11 billion in funding awarded by the CDC and roughly $1 billion by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration.
In addition, the Trump administration said on Thursday that 10,000 employees of the Health and Human Services Department would also be fired as part of a major reorganization designed by Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
The CDC will also have its workforce cut by about 2,400 employees, while the Federal Food and Drug Administration will lose 3,500 jobs.
Uncertain Times
There are far more questions than answers when it comes to what the future of federal grants will look like under the Trump administration. The only real consistency for now is that federal agencies are not accepting new applications for grant programs.
The Food Bank of Wyoming recently learned it will not receive $535,000 that was promised in a 2023 grant. Other program grants have been “frozen,” with much uncertainty about whether they’ll exist for the future.
Cheyenne City Council member Pete Laybourn said this isn’t the type of regulatory environment that the federal government should be practicing and makes city budgeting extremely difficult.
“We have needs we expect to meet in cooperation with the federal government, but just don’t have the ability to make yet, which is very confusing,” he said. “This is not the way the government should operate. We need certainty, whether it’s ‘yes’ or ‘no,’ we need certainty.”
Leo Wolfson can be reached at leo@cowboystatedaily.com.
