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Q&A
Council Member Brannan and Acting Commissioner Morse discuss potential federal funding cuts
0:21:02
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4 min
Council Member Justin Brannan inquires about the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene's preparations for potential federal funding cuts, particularly from Washington. Acting Commissioner Michelle Morse responds by detailing the extent of federal funding in their budget, the potential impact on various health programs, and the department's planning activities to address these threats.
- The department receives $600 million in federal funding, supporting 66 grants across about a dozen federal agencies.
- 80% of the funding for the division of infectious disease comes from federal sources.
- Potential cuts to Medicaid and the CDC budget are major concerns, as they could significantly impact public health programs and safety net hospitals in New York City.
Justin Brannan
0:21:02
And I guess just to zoom out a bit.
0:21:04
I mean we had a very candid conversation with Doctor.
0:21:08
Katz yesterday from H and H about obviously this accidental funding threat from Washington.
0:21:16
Could you talk a bit about how you're preparing for this if this bill goes through and it would be catastrophic for the city of New York?
0:21:27
How do we make this work?
0:21:29
What are we looking at?
0:21:30
Where do we find savings to survive this?
Michelle Morse
0:21:33
Yeah, thank you for the question.
0:21:35
It is certainly the thing that keeps us all up at night right now.
0:21:38
We're extremely concerned about both the federal funding threats to the CDC budget as well as to Medicaid and the essential plan.
0:21:48
These are all looming threats and cuts that would fundamentally compromise our core infrastructure to deliver on public health programs across New York City.
0:21:59
Just a couple of things to describe the context and then some of the planning that we're doing.
0:22:04
So we have $600,000,000 in federal funding within the New York City Health Department budget That supports upwards of about 66 different grants across about a dozen federal agencies.
0:22:19
The majority of that funding is CDC funding.
0:22:23
And I want to highlight that within our division of infectious disease, about 80% of the funding for that division is federal funding.
0:22:34
From the Medicaid side, half of New York City is on Medicaid, 60% of our children are on Medicaid, and about fifty five percent of the births that occur in New York City are to mothers who are on Medicaid.
0:22:47
Medicaid is one of the most essential insurance programs that ensures that many of our safety net hospitals across the city are allowed to continue to function.
0:22:59
And Health and Hospitals of course is the largest safety net hospital across the city, but there are several other safety net hospitals where the majority of the patients that they see are patients that are on Medicaid for health insurance.
0:23:12
So the combination of threats to Medicaid and the essential plan, as well as to all of the other federal funding, the $600,000,000 that we receive in federal funding, is truly concerning for us.
0:23:24
We have done a series of different planning activities over the past several months to prepare for what might be coming.
0:23:31
However, it is very difficult to prepare when it's very hard to predict exactly what is going to happen.
0:23:38
So we have done a series of planning activities to look at all $600,000,000, all 66 federal grants, and figure out exactly what activities they cover, how many staff they support, and also what kinds of programming they specifically cover, and if those programs are mandated programs or essential programs or kind of what level of priority we would give to those programs.
0:24:03
We've also done, of course, a series of planning around some of the other federal grants that we think are highest risk.
0:24:10
For example, we think that there are significant risks to our HIV funding and other preventative care funding that have already kind of been signaled by the federal government that they're not a priority.
0:24:22
And then finally there was a leaked HHS skinny budget that we analyzed that came out a few weeks ago.
0:24:31
It specifically reorganized a number of key agencies.
0:24:36
So we're also concerned that there may be administrative delays because of this reorganization and the 20,000 staff that are no longer within HHS, ten thousand that were fired, 10,000 that decided to retire.
0:24:52
So we're worried that again that there's risk of us not receiving funding for our federal grants in a timely way.
0:24:59
We're also concerned again that even if that funding does occur, if we do receive funding, that there may be contingencies around health equity or other language and there are a number of other concerns.
0:25:13
So those planning activities are important that we've done.
0:25:16
However, I would be, I do not want to overstate that they will make sure that we can predict, we can't predict exactly what might happen next in terms of the federal budget cuts.