Health officials from Alabama to Washington state say that congressional gridlock over providing billions in new money has undermined efforts to transition to a steady, long-term approach to Covid-19.
“They’re cutting the legs out from under a solid Covid response in the future,” Arkansas Secretary of Health José Romero told POLITICO. “This is going to cripple the response.”
The new plans, from Oregon’s “Resilience in Support of Equity” to North Carolina’s “Moving Forward Together,” map out how state health departments intend to transition from crisis response to disease management while maintaining the capacity to ramp up public health operations when new waves of the virus arrive. The policies, which state health officials announced over the last few weeks, vary in specifics, but center around the idea that the public health interventions should be predictable even when the virus isn’t.
But the congressional stalemate has left states uncertain about whether they can implement their new strategies even as they face the Omicron subvariant BA.2, which sent case numbers in Europe skyrocketing in recent weeks and is now the dominant Covid variant in the U.S. While cases have continued to decline nationally over the last two weeks, they have started to rise in some states, especially in the northeast.
“We are well positioned, but not if somehow we can’t get our act together and come to a consensus on a way to continue to have some funding for this,” said Marcus Plescia, chief medical officer for the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials.
The Biden administration asked Congress for $22.5 billion to continue fighting the pandemic in the near term. Senators are instead closing in on a roughly $10 billion aid package. That proposal could advance through the upper chamber in the coming days but would still need approval in the House.
Lawmakers have been at an impasse for weeks as Republicans demand an accounting of how previous pandemic aid has been spent — as well as insist any new dollars be offset by cuts to other programs — and Democrats advocate for more cash.
A proposal agreed to by party leaders but scuttled in the House earlier this month had proposed clawing back $7 billion in federal recovery dollars from 30 states to help pay for a new round of roughly $15 billion in pandemic aid.
States are adamant they need both the recovery aid approved by Congress last spring — a broad pot of dollars states can use to rebuild their economies, invest in health care infrastructure and support essential workers — as well as the additional Covid-specific dollars.
Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson and New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy, the chair and co-chair, respectively, of the National Governors Association, have asked the White House and Congress to ensure states “have the necessary resources to continue to respond to COVID-19, while also protecting current commitments from the federal government, including State and Local Fiscal Recovery Funds.”
In Washington state, Gov. Jay Inslee’s office has been in contact with the White House to underscore that the state legislature has already appropriated federal recovery funds and that there would be “significant direct impacts if that promised funding wasn’t received,” Inslee spokesperson Jaime Smith said. Washington state stood to lose nearly $400 million in funding under the original $15 billion Covid-19 deal.
“We would like to be able to trust that when the feds commit funding to us, we can budget accordingly and know they’re going to follow through,” Smith said.
The Congressional deadlock has left some states hastily making contingency plans, particularly…
Read More: States are ready to live with Covid. Congress’ funding fight is making that hard.