Pirate's Cove

That’s not a lot of jobs for $100 million

NC Health and Human Services Department to cut 80 jobs, lose $100 million in federal funding

The North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services is planning to cut 80 jobs and will lose more than $100 million in funding.

The reductions are due to the federal government’s “abrupt and immediate termination of several federal grants,” a department spokesperson said in a statement. (snip)

The $100 million North Carolina is losing in funding directly contributes to the “health, safety and wellbeing of the people we serve,” the NCDHHS spokesperson wrote.

Specifically, the federal grant funding impacts several areas of work, including immunization efforts, funding for the new NC Immunization Registry, infectious disease monitoring and response, behavioral health, substance use disorder services and more. Some of the impacted funding supports work that is done by local health departments, universities, hospitals and local departments of social services.

The NCDHHS is also putting impacted vendors on notice to pause work supported by the funding.

Maybe Democrats will finally figure out that it is not the best thing to rely on Los Federales funding so much? That the entire system of US government was meant for the feds to deal with specific issues authorized by the Constitution, and the states and cities deal with everything else? That it is not that wise to be send so much tax money to the feds, where a new admin can do something different? And, really, all that federal money means states can play the waste, fraud, and idiotic spending game. And, it’s a bad idea to rely so damned much on private companies to do the work.

Meanwhile

Trump administration says it will pull back billions in COVID funding from local health departments

Federal health officials said Tuesday they are pulling back $11.4 billion in COVID-19-related funds for state and local public health departments and other health organizations throughout the nation.

“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.

The statement said the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention expects to recover the money beginning 30 days after termination notices, which began being sent out on Monday.

Yeah, they are doing this about 6 months early, but, come on, the pandemic is over, time to stop pissing away this money which just puts lots of money in people’s pockets for nothing.

In a related move, more than two dozen COVID-related research grants funded by the National Institutes of Health have been canceled. Earlier this month, the Trump administration shut down ordering from covidtest.gov, the site where Americans could have COVID-19 tests delivered to their mailboxes for no charge.

That’ll make the loons still wearing masks in their cars very upset.

At this point, it’s unclear exactly how health departments will be affected by the pullback of funds. But some were starting to look at what it might mean for them. In Washington state, for example, health officials were notified that more than $125 million in COVID-related funding has been immediately terminated. They are “assessing the impact” of the actions, they said.

In Los Angeles County, health officials said they could lose more than $80 million in core funding for vaccinations and other services. “Much of this funding supports disease surveillance, public health lab services, outbreak investigations, infection control activities at healthcare facilities and data transparency,” a department official wrote in an email.

Let them spend their own money on their Wuhan flu crazy. COVID is over. It’s essentially the flu at this point. Maybe states shouldn’t rely so much on federal money.