'Where's our money?' CDC grant funding is moving so slowly layoffs are happening
Source: NPR
June 28, 2025 7:00 AM ET
Health departments around the country have noticed there's something strange happening with funding from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention: It's not showing up on schedule and there's been no communication about why.
The federal public health agency doles out most of the money it receives from Congress to state and local health departments, which then contract with local organizations. That's how public health work gets funded in the U.S.
According to two CDC staff members with knowledge of the agency's budget, the CDC has yet to receive its full funding for the 2025 fiscal year. NPR agreed not to name the staff members because they were not authorized to speak to the media.
Both CDC staffers say the funding is now months late, and it will soon be too late to disperse the agency's grants that local health departments are waiting on. In the interim, the CDC has been operating with just 30-days of funding at a time. The staffers say this amounts to impounding the agency's funding. One of them called it "rescission by inertia."
Read more: https://www.npr.org/sections/shots-health-news/2025/06/28/nx-s1-5442689/cdc-trump-layoffs-public-health-rescission
Because the government has to go through an "end of fiscal year" accounting process, agencies generally create a procurement calendar and timeline whereby approvals for purchases of a certain type and/or amount, are phased down. This tends to start happening in July and continues through to Sept. 30. That way, the financial folks can then go through the tedious process of determining what has and has not been obligated and what can or cannot be rolled over into a new fiscal year. Anything that needs to be spent during a current FY that hasn't been obligated by a certain designated date, will then be allowed to automatically be returned to the Treasury by the end of the day on Sept. 30, just before the Oct. 1st beginning of the new FY.
I remember at least one year during a "fiscal crisis" when GSA had our agency on a month-by-month allocation of funds similar to what was mentioned in the OP article (where the funding is normally done by quarter and I think ours roughly came out to about 10% of the FY's allocation for each month) and it was a PITA to deal with, because, shit happens and you don't have the $$$ to take care of it!
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