About $1 million in federal grant money was suddenly halted to the Boston Public Health Commission last week, cutting into funds for community health programs and tackling health disparities.
Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency listed two BPHC grants on its website that were terminated on Sunday, March 23, touting those and other cuts on its website as “savings.”
Dr. Bisola Ojikutu, the commission’s executive director, said they learned last Tuesday about the loss of funding from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. She said the impact will be limited, but she disputes the idea that this is saving money for the American people.
“This is meant to be a cost savings for our country, and not realizing that it’s the money that we invest in public health [that] actually leads to the cost savings at the end of the day,” she said. “So for us, as public health folks, we see that as counterintuitive.”
Most of the grant money — a total of $14.5 million — had already been given to the commission and spent over the past few years. Both were aimed at pandemic recovery and building up public health infrastructure. But there will be some impact at local community health centers, where some of the grant money was supposed to be directed through this fall.
“We did have to cut funding to these organizations that were receiving the money because we don’t have the money anymore. So that’s a problem,” she said. “Not having those funds available I think is a challenge. We would like to continue to, and we will through other means, continue to support our community health centers. But that is a change — when we had been doing this work since 2021, and we were hoping to be able to continue it.”
The Boston Public Health Commission had been providing funding to local community health centers to support what are known as community health workers, helping patients learn about local social services.
Beyond these two grants, Ojikutu worries about the bigger picture: a fifth of the commission’s funding comes from the federal government.
She said those dollars go toward workforce development, building up the city’s data capabilities to track potential disease threats, messaging about health concerns to Boston’s residents, addressing chronic disease with nutrition and exercise, and generally building up the city’s public health infrastructure.
“It’s clear that we are facing a serious threat to the future of public health, and I think this is a national threat,” she said. “And it’s a very concerning threat, especially when we’re dealing with the potential for a measles outbreak, potential for H5N1 uptick or a human-to-human transmission,” she said, referencing the avian flu.
Ojikutu says the commission is considering whether to challenge the federal government’s decision to terminate the grants.
