Update, March 28, 6:00 pm
Michigan House Democrats released a statement Friday referencing this story, saying they “await confirmation from the Department on this past week’s potential $390 million in cuts." MDHHS has still not responded to additional requests for comment Friday, or provided a timeline for when a response could be expected.
Requests to Michigan Senator Elissa Slotkin (D) and Sen. Gary Peters (D) for information or comment about HHS cuts to Michigan were not answered by deadline Friday.
Other states continue to release information about this week's HHS cuts. Minnesota's health department says the cuts amount to losing 25% of its budget, and expects to layoff 150-200 workers, according to CBS. Rhode Island's health department says it is losing $31 million for "vaccination work, some of our epidemiology and laboratory capacity work, work to address health disparities, and community health workers," according to The Providence Journal. Iowa's health department wouldn't say how much money it's losing, but told Iowa Public Radio it was already in the process of "winding down" the impacted programs in expectation of the funding ending later this year.
Original post, March 27, 2025 at 8:16 PM EDT
More than $390 million in federal grants to the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services appears to have been abruptly discontinued this week, according to the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) website.
The site, which has been riddled with major inaccuracies and overinflated numbers in the past, says the cuts were from grants administered by the federal Health and Human Services department, but gives no specifics as to which state programs the grants covered.
They’re presumably part of the more than $11 billion in HHS grant cuts reported this week, from funding Congress authorized for state public health efforts during the COVID pandemic.
But states have also been able to use the remaining money in those grants (which were set to expire late this year) for other public health work, including programs on infectious disease, mental health, and addiction services.
About $1 billion of the national cuts to states’ funding were made by the federal Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) which is part of HHS.
“SAMHSA expects to save over $1 billion in Coronavirus Preparedness and Response Supplemental Appropriations Act of 2020 (H.R. 6074) and American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 (H.R. 1319) funds,” a SAMHSA spokesperson said via email Thursday.
“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. HHS is prioritizing funding projects that will deliver on President Trump’s mandate to Make America Healthy Again.”
The spokesperson declined to provide any further information, including whether the SAMHSA cuts will impact Michigan. HHS did not immediately return a request for comment and clarification on the MDHHS cuts.
As of Thursday evening, the DOGE site lists more than a dozen separate cuts to MDHHS from HHS, all dated March 23, varying widely from the largest purported “savings” of more than $230 million (out of a roughly $575 million total grant) to the smallest “savings” of $80,582.92 (out of a $532,185 total grant.)
“As soon as I have something, I will send your way,” an MDHHS spokesperson said via email Thursday afternoon, when asked whether the DOGE numbers are accurate, what information the state has received from HHS about which Michigan grants will be impacted, and any potential plans for cuts at the state level as a result.
A spokesperson for Governor Gretchen Whitmer's office declined to comment when asked about the purported hundreds of millions of dollars in cuts to state health funding, saying they would “let DHHS speak on this on behalf of the administration.”
And a spokesperson for Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel, who has repeatedly joined other state AGs in suing the Trump administration in an attempt to block other funding cuts, did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
How other states are reacting to the cuts
Other states varied widely in their initial responses to the cuts, from threatening legal action to saying they were still seeking to understand them.
New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy, a Democrat, released a statement Thursday saying the Trump administration had “ripped away $350 million in Congressionally-approved federal funding for the New Jersey Department of Health and the New Jersey Department of Human Services.”
“At a time when measles, tuberculosis, and bird flu have been reported in our region, these cuts will force our state to take contact tracers out of the field and vastly limit the ability of local health departments to follow up on reported cases … We will do everything we can to restore this funding — including taking legal action — so we can keep the people of New Jersey safe and healthy," Murphy's statement said.
And New York Governor Kathy Hochul said her state is losing some $300 million in the cuts, according to NPR.
“At a time when New York is facing an ongoing opioid epidemic, multiple confirmed cases of measles and an ongoing mental health crisis, these cuts will be devastating," Hochul said. "There is no state in this country that has the financial resources to backfill the massive federal funding cuts."
In Colorado, health officials said they were losing some $250 million in “ongoing and planned funding,” a state health department spokesperson told Colorado Public Radio.
“This sudden change impacts 60 programs across the state of Colorado that provide a wide range of services including: crisis resolution teams, services for adults with serious mental illness, peer services for Coloradans in recovery for substance use disorder, and support for young adults who have experienced an early onset of psychotic spectrum illness — just to name a few.”
In Louisiana, the DOGE website suggests some $55 million in state cuts, while state health officials said earlier this week they believed the cuts to be about $10 million, according to New Orleans Public Radio.
“We were looking at some of those grants to pay for things like some portions of our crisis services,” Karen Stubbs, an assistant secretary at the Louisiana health department, told lawmakers in a hearing earlier this week. “So we're still trying to sort out if we can shift them to other grants with payments there, or what that impact is.”
