Amid a deluge of cuts to federal spending, the Trump administration has canceled three grants totaling $85.6 million to Santa Clara County that helped fund public health initiatives related to the COVID-19 pandemic and vaccines.
More than 98% of the grant funds had already been spent by the time they were canceled in March, but County Executive James Williams and Dr. Sarah Rudman, the acting public health officer, worry that the terminations are just “the tip of the iceberg.” The $85.6 million is a sliver of the $3.6 billion in federal funds the county receives each year — roughly $140 million of that comes in the form of grants that support programs spanning from public health and housing to transportation and public safety.
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The three canceled grants were awarded at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, but Rudman said it allowed the county’s public health department to “protect the community from many more diseases well beyond COVID.”
“In some ways, the work that was directly hit by (the termination of) these grants remains some of the most important work we do in public health — protecting people from immediate outbreaks, deadly disease and vaccine preventable infections is something that in many ways is only something the public health department can do,” Rudman said in an interview.
Only one of the grants — a $5.7 million initiative to address COVID-19 health disparities — was administered directly by the federal government. Rudman said it was focused on communities that were hit the hardest by the pandemic and prevention efforts to ensure those same areas wouldn’t disproportionately be impacted by whatever disease comes next. But the grant termination notice that Santa Clara County received said it was canceled “for cause” due to the end of the pandemic.
United States health officials ended the federal COVID-19 public health emergency in May 2023, though the virus continues to circulate.
“These grants and cooperative agreements were issued for a limited purpose: to ameliorate the effects of the pandemic,” the termination notice said. “Now that the pandemic is over, the grants and cooperative agreements are no longer necessary, as their limited purpose has run out.”
The other two grants were administered by the California Department of Public Health. On March 28, the county received a letter from the state that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention ended several grants and that work performed by local health departments in these areas wouldn’t be compensated by the state if the federal government doesn’t provide reimbursement. The county said no reason was given for the termination of the grants.
The $62 million epidemiology and laboratory capacity grant allowed the county to update its public health lab, giving it access to modernized testing capabilities. Rudman said that because of the grant, they “were able to be the first place in the country that detected H5N1 bird flu in raw cows milk using a novel testing mechanism.”
“This is one we never would have been able to do without the same personnel, facilities and technology we built off of these COVID-focused grants,” she said.
The last grant, which was nearly $18 million, was related to vaccines and helped the county access COVID vaccines, track the vaccine supply and educate people about the vaccine.
In a statement, Williams, the county executive, said that as soon as the grants were terminated, the “county took action to claim expenditures made related to these grants to ensure we were effectively reimbursed for what was owed by the federal government. The county had to spend an extraordinary amount of effort to shift budget strategies and prioritize claiming faster than usual in order to accomplish this.”
The county is facing budgetary uncertainty, with roughly 30% of its budget coming from federal dollars. Bracing for impact, Williams has recommended pulling nearly $70 million in federal funds out of the upcoming budget that the county assumes will either no longer be available or have new conditions placed on them. Of those funds, $19.3 million was supposed to go to the Public Health Department.
At the same time, federal health agencies have announced plans for mass layoffs, and the Trump administration has tried to wipe health information off government websites relating to the LGBTQ+ community, HIV/AIDS and reproductive care.
“The federal government has been quite clear in signaling what they intend to do in terms of dismantling of the infrastructure we rely on to make people have an opportunity to be healthy and to be safe,” Rudman said. “One of the things that I think is so important that we’re doing here in Santa Clara County is we are not waiting for the federal hits to come.”