Key staffers tasked with tracking infectious diseases, providing health care and connecting residents of Utah’s most populous county to services are on their way out at the Salt Lake County Health Department.
The reason: a Trump Administration decision this week to claw back $11.4 billion in COVID-19-related funding from state and local health departments across the nation. While the money was doled out in response to the pandemic, not all of the funds were supporting COVID-specific work. The funding had been scheduled to continue until next year.
In Salt Lake County, that’s forced the layoffs of 17 employees, including epidemiologists, nurses and community health workers. It’s “not easy to absorb” the loss of such experts, spokesperson Nicholas Rupp said, as the department tries to safeguard public health.
“It’s going to be difficult. We are going to cover those areas as best we can,” Rupp said. “... Losing epidemiologists means the remaining epidemiologists will have more diseases to track, right? It’s the same amount of work spread over fewer people.”
At the Utah Department of Health and Human Services, the jobs of 37 employees in positions funded by the COVID-related grants will end April 11, the agency announced Friday. The state said it had expected to receive an additional approximately $98 million before the funding period was set to end in 2026.
A total of 187 staff positions, many of them temporary, were funded partially or completely by six coronavirus-related grants that Utah received and have now ended, it said.
Director Tracy Gruber said the agency was “sorry to see these positions end early. We consider them all public health heroes, many of whom joined our department when we needed to ramp up operations to keep Utahns safe during the global pandemic. These staff came in to serve the public at an incredibly difficult time.”
Rick Egan | The Salt Lake Tribune) COVID-19 vaccinations provided by the Salt Lake County Health Department at the Rancho Market parking lot on Redwood Road, on Jan. 6, 2022.
In an email obtained by The Salt Lake Tribune, department spokesman Joe Dougherty told staffers Friday that the federal government’s decision to terminate these funds early “was not entirely unexpected, but the timing was.”
”The lack of warning of the announcement is causing challenges across the department as we continue to maintain our operations,” he wrote. ”But we know the staff and our external partners bear the real stress and fear of the sudden decisions by our federal partners,” Dougherty continued. “The sudden action is disappointing and not what we would expect from our partners.”
In the days since the department “received the news,” he said officials had been “analyzing the impact and waiting to see if the decision would be reversed.” It wasn’t — and the email shared the news of the staffing cuts.
Federal cuts overall have been front of mind for health care workers, said Carrie Butler, executive director of the Utah Public Health Association. Seventy to 90% of Utah’s funding for public health comes from the federal government; much of it through the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and National Institutes of Health, she said.
One of the biggest impacts of federal cuts will be to infectious disease surveillance, she predicted. That “is very scary, especially as we are seeing emerging threats,” she said. The result will be that public health institutions will be “on the defense,” she said, and less prepared to prevent diseases before they turn into larger, and more costly, issues.
UTAH PUBLIC HEALTH LAYOFFS
Here are the number of public health workers laid off in Utah.
• Department of Health and Human Services, statewide: 37
• Bear River Health Department: 5
• Salt Lake County Health Department: 17
• Southeast Utah health department: 2
• Southwest Utah Health Department: 5
• Summit County Health Department: 1
These departments do not plan layoffs: Weber-Morgan, Utah, San Juan and Wasatch counties, and the Central Utah Health Department.
Davis County Health Department is undecided. Other departments have not responded to inquiries from The Salt Lake Tribune.
It’s not clear whether the Trump administration has the authority to unilaterally take the COVID-related funding — appropriated by Congress — back, The Hill reported this week. Other similar cancellations of grants have led to lawsuits, and states have said they were looking at their options, The Hill said.
“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 U.S. Department of Health and Human Services said in a statement reported by The Associated Press.
Layoffs, service reductions in Utah counties
The public health association had already had to let go of an employee who was developing a training and certification program for community health workers, the professionals who help Utahns navigate and get connected to health care, Butler said.
Those are the kind of employees the Bear River Health Department said it has laid off. They worked in programs that help residents get access to care, from mental health and substance abuse treatment to immunizations and home visits to new parents. The department serves more than 160,000 people in Box Elder, Cache, and Rich counties, according to its website.
The Southwest Utah Public Health Department laid off five employees this week, spokesperson David Heaton confirmed. It serves Beaver, Garfield, Iron, Kane and Washington counties.
The employees were “mostly community health workers hired during the COVID period to do COVID work,” said Cameron Mitchell, the department’s deputy health officer. They were still doing some work directly related to COVID but were generally helping special populations, Mitchell said.
“Their primary purpose was to reach out to the community to try and make sure that everyone was being served,” Mitchell said, which at times included helping with dental clinics and safety checks for child car seats.
While it was “kind of unexpected that the federal government pulled the money away so quickly,” Mitchell said, the staffers knew they were in temporary positions. Some had worked for the department “for a year or two and had built some relationships with staff and community partners. So there were some frustrations, for sure,” he said.
Summit County Health officials laid off one staffer and dropped some pandemic-related programming, spokesperson Derek Siddoway said in a statement. The cuts were necessary because of funding’s “abrupt end,” he said, even as the department had budgeted “to reflect the time-limited nature of these federal funds.”
Southeast Utah Health Department has laid off two community health workers. “It indirectly affects all of us in that we will do everything in our power to cover those roles, but it’s a huge loss,” department spokesperson Brittney Garff said.
Davis County is still determining whether there will be layoffs or cuts to programs, health department spokesperson Trevor Warner said. “There will be an impact because of the cuts. We just don’t know what the scale will be yet,” he said.
The Utah, Weber-Morgan, Wasatch and San Juan county departments, and the Central Utah health department, all said they are not laying off staff.
Utah County “made a concerted effort not to rely on COVID funds moving forward from early 2024, and the health department followed suit,” spokesperson Aislynn Tolman-Hill said.
The Central Utah department serves six counties: Juab, Millard, Paiute, Sanpete, Sevier and Wayne. While it “will be scaling back some programs and operations, we will not be conducting any layoffs or reduction in force,” a spokesperson said.
Spokespeople for both Weber-Morgan and Wasatch County departments said cuts had “accelerated” their planning or transitions, but they have been able to adjust without layoffs. Mike Moulton, interim director of San Juan County Public Health, said it has had to “realign certain job responsibilities,” but “for the foreseeable future, we do not anticipate any layoffs or program cuts.”
Impacts far beyond COVID
The pandemic-era funding has supported programs like tobacco cessation and improving maternal outcomes, Butler explained, because the programs do have a direct relationship to pandemic response. They tackle “comorbidities” — or illnesses and conditions that a person experiences that ultimately make them sicker than they’d be if they were ill only from the coronavirus or another emerging disease.
“And so when we say it’s just COVID funding, what that really means is that we are losing critical infrastructure building funds,” Butler explained. “And when we’re funding COVID-related programming, we are also funding all public health-related programming and scenarios, which means that we’re preparing ourselves for the next thing.”
“COVID killed a lot of people in Utah,” she added. “... We don’t talk about it because what we automatically think is, ‘Oh, they had a pre-existing condition.’ Well, those pre-existing conditions that people were then dying from COVID because of, are all preventable — not all of them, but a lot of them.”
An epidemiologist who is being laid off from the state agreed that this broad support is still needed. “We still have an influenza epidemiologist, we have a measles epidemiologist, we have a hepatitis epidemiologist,” they said. “None of those are necessarily having, you know, huge pandemics, but you don’t get rid of the subject matter expert just because there’s not a current emergency.”
The Salt Lake Tribune agreed to not identify the epidemiologist because the departing employee is concerned that being named could lead to retribution or affect their job hunt. They shared their notice of separation with The Tribune.
Public health workers “really enjoy that we get to serve our community, and I wish that public service was something more people could do, not less, with this big reduction that’s happening everywhere,” they said. “I think serving your community is patriotic, and I’m really sad that that’s being discouraged right now and that people are being treated so badly.”
