- A temporary restraining order blocks about $380 million in grants to Michigan's health department from being abruptly cut off.
- Local health projects funded by those grants are still under a stop work order until they receive official notice from the state.
- The cuts come as Michigan deals with "an increasing prevalence of diseases like measles and avian influenza."
Michigan’s local public health officials are “in a holding pattern” for now, after a federal judge in Rhode Island issued a Temporary Restraining Order (TRO) on Thursday, blocking some $11 billion in abrupt cuts made by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services last week.
Those HHS cuts include about $380 million in grant funding to Michigan, which the state health department was in turn using for more than 330 local grants for a range of public health measures, including “disease surveillance, harm reduction, health education, testing and treatment,” according to court filings signed by Elizabeth Hertel, Director of the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services.
Michigan was one of 23 states and the District of Columbia that sued the Trump administration on April 1 over the cuts, which were announced on March 24 and caused “a panic throughout the State of Michigan,” according to Hertel’s statement to the court.
“This abrupt loss of federal funding will put the public’s health at risk not only for COVID-19, but for other infectious and communicable diseases as well,” she said.
“President Trump and Secretary Kennedy have pledged to ‘Make America Healthy Again,’ while cutting critical support for infectious disease control, substance abuse treatment, vaccination clinics, mental health services, and many more treatments that Americans rely upon for their everyday health and well-being,” said Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel in a statement Friday.
“These cuts were not just ill-timed and illegal, they are antithetical to the very mission of the Department of Health and Human Services. I am grateful for the swift decision by Judge [Mary S.] McElroy, which will undoubtedly have a positive impact on Michiganders’ lives.”
But the federal judge’s order on Thursday doesn’t mean the impacted work automatically resumes in Michigan.
Oakland County announced Wednesday that it had already let go of five contracted public health staff as a result of the cuts. Those workers “provided infection prevention support to 146 long-term care facilities, assisted in hundreds of disease investigations and coordinated outbreak response efforts,” the county said. The staffers were funded through a $2.5 million grant, of which $2.1 million was still unspent, according to a county statement.
On Wednesday, those staffers were told “not to report to their jobs,” county officials said. They had assisted “with 123 COVID, 25 norovirus, 126 influenza outbreaks" since September 25, 2024, and aided communicable disease staff investigators “with 382 cases of reportable infectious diseases,” as well as helping the county “make several hundred phone calls to residents for contact monitoring and follow up including Ebola travelers, Bird Flu, measles and rabies," according to the county.
But for now, local health officials are “in a holding pattern,” said Oakland County public information officer Bill Mullan on Friday afternoon. The state health department has to issue a written notice formally removing the stop work order, he said. “It could happen any time, but work can’t resume until it does.”
Washtenaw County was able to move a couple of staff who were working on the terminated grants to other funding sources, said county health department spokesperson Susan Ringler Cerniglia. The cuts represented about 6% of the county’s budget, which halted work on some public education campaigns about vaccines, as well as efforts to translate information about vaccines into non-English languages. For now, the judge’s ruling “doesn’t change anything for us,” she said. “We have to hear officially” from the state.
“The other thing that’s tricky is, we can’t just go back and forth, changing grants and creating accounting nightmares for ourselves,” she said. “We can’t ‘un-hold’ anything until there’s further clarity.”
The Michigan Department of Health and Human Services did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Friday.
What Michigan told the federal judge
In her written filing to the court, Hertel warned the judge that “critical public health services will be severely impacted” in the state, and the terminations “will cause immediate harm to … residents of the state of Michigan.” More than 120 MDHHS employees and affiliates are impacted by the cuts, according to Hertel.
The terminated federal projects include three to Michigan from the CDC and two from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA.)
The CDC grants were funding vaccination orders, storage, and handling, as well as vaccine clinics and public health information campaigns. They were also going to share census-tract level immunization data for COVID-19, influenza, and Measles Mumps and Rubella (MMR) with local health departments, who “do not have routine access to the vaccination status of people living in their jurisdiction.”
Michigan has had three measles cases so far this year, all reported in the past month. The first was confirmed in Oakland County on March 14, and the second was confirmed Tuesday in Kent County. “This marks the county's first confirmed measles case since 2013,” Kent County officials said in a statement. Those counties published lists of places where the public might have been exposed to a contagious person.
On Friday, Macomb County confirmed a case of measles in an adult who “recently traveled to Ontario, Canada which is currently experiencing a measles outbreak. Since they were not out in public during their infectious period, there are no known public exposure locations.”
Also on Friday, Oakland County announced its first mumps case of the year, “the first reported case in Oakland County since 2022 and the ninth in Michigan in 2025,” according to a statement from the county.
The federal funding was also being used to create a statewide Wastewater Testing System, according to Hertel’s statement to the court. “The loss of these funds will reduce that system by 75%, closing collection sites and laboratories, and reducing the areas of the state where disease can be detected through this mechanism.”
And the state was in the midst of modernizing its data and lab systems, including parts of the Michigan Disease Surveillance System (MDSS), which “enables prompt response and containment of infectious disease,” Hertel said. The current MDSS system is more than 20 years old and out of date, according to the court filing. “This is particularly alarming as we see an increasing prevalence of diseases like measles and avian influenza which require prompt and comprehensive public health action.”
The notices MDHHS received from the federal agencies last week said that the grants were being terminated “for cause.”
“The only additional information or clarification provided is the allegation that these ‘[t]hese grants and cooperative agreements were issued for a limited purpose: to ameliorate the effects of the pandemic. Now that the pandemic is over, the grants and cooperative agreements are no longer necessary as their limited purpose has run out,’” the court filing said.
