Michigan public health labs try to adjust after loss of federal funds

• Public health’s coffers, arguably underfunded for decades, were boosted with COVID-era funding
• In Michigan, $5.5 million was being used to boost defense against disease outbreaks and terrorism, but the Trump administration abruptly ended the funds in March
• Supporters of the cuts say it’s time to end those funds now that the pandemic is over

GAYLORD —The equipment inside a public health lab here sits shiny, new and eerily quiet. These rooms are dark. Three lab staff have been laid off.

In Saginaw, the job posting for an epidemiologist at another public health lab has been yanked.

In Newbury, in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, the leaky lab roof won’t get repaired as planned. And when a courier who delivered time-sensitive lab samples — the kinds that keep farmers’ wells clean and restaurants safe — moved to a different job, the position wasn’t refilled.

These are three of the six labs that make up the Michigan Regional Laboratory System that were sharing in $5.5 million in federal funds to expand capacity. The goal was to tighten the state’s defenses against disease outbreak and — according to one public health leader — even terrorist attacks.

But the funds that began at the height of COVID were abruptly canceled in March, part of $11 billion cuts by the US Department of Government Efficiency. And that’s left public health leaders scrambling to make do with less.

In statements shared with news outlets at the time of the funding cuts, a federal health department spokesperson said the department “will no longer waste billions of taxpayer dollars responding to a non-existent pandemic that Americans moved on from years ago.”

Without the funds, equipment purchases and infrastructure improvements stopped, which will limit facilities’ ability to conduct testing and address future disease outbreaks, some health leaders say. In some cases, that meant disrupting contracts that were underway, like the $162,000 lab software upgrade at the LMAS District Health Department in Newbury. Also canceled: The department’s $100,000 contract to replace a leaky roof that has sent spreading stains across the ceiling and seeped roof water into light fixtures.’’

Two months later, the future is uncertain.

Michigan’s Dana Nessel was among attorney generals of 23 states and the District of Columbia that sued the Trump administration over the cuts, arguing that cuts deprive states of funds for “vital state and local government public health programs.” Last week, Rhode Island District Court Judge Mary McElroy issued a preliminary injunction barring the Trump administration from making the cuts. 

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“It's pretty chaotic,” said Nick Derusha, health officer at the LMAS health department, which covers Luce, Mackinac, Alger and Schoolcraft counties.

The funding originally was prioritized for COVID surveillance to blunt the pandemic's spread, but the grants were a welcome infusion of funds for another reason, too: Public health departments arguably have been underfunded for years. 

New equipment and staff meant building out capacity for more long-term disease surveillance — a “testing infrastructure,” said Christine Harrington, health officer of the Saginaw County Health Department. After all, she said, strong local labs are crucial to blunt diseases before they become large-scale outbreaks. They are also critical testing sites in intentional crises, like the anthrax attacks of 2001, she said.

Lab tech Penny Nowlin walked through the Health Department of Northwest Michigan’s lab recently here in Gaylord, a northern city that welcomes countless visitors to its restaurants and other attractions each year to escape city life — visitors that depend on safe drinking water and clean waterways. 

In one room, machines hummed, plunging pipettes in and out of test tubes as part of an effort to check for pathogens in drinking water.

Elsewhere, the lab rooms were dark.

In March, the federal notice of cuts arrived in inboxes just Nowlin and thousands of local residents reeled from a freak ice storm that sent tree tops crashing into front yards and across roads and plunged much of the area in a power outage. When she and other lab staff returned to the office, the years of planning had been upended.

Nowlin holds out hope that the expanded lab will be online again soon. For now, she said — her eyes sweeping the unused equipment — it’s “collecting dust.”

Elsewhere, public health leaders told Bridge that the COVID-era funding would have helped speed up water quality testing for residents' well water or in systems that serve local restaurants, for example. Health departments in Oakland County and the western Upper Peninsula were testing for latent tuberculosis; Oakland was checking for polio in the wastewater. Saginaw County was in process of onboarding mosquito pool testing in a multicounty effort to tamp down mosquitos and check for diseases among them, according to state officials.

Regional labs in 2024 conducted nearly 250,000 tests for sexually transmitted diseases, blood-borne pathogens, respiratory pathogens, water safety, and drug abuse for treatment court participants, for example, a state health department spokesperson told Bridge.

Janenne Pung, director of community health services for the Health Department of Northwest Michigan, said she was not prepared to discuss specifics of the tests that the department had decided to focus on, because details hadn’t been finalized.

“It was something that we were looking into — what tests should we be doing? What tests can we be doing? What does the community need?” she said.

‘COVID is done’

Supporters of the Trump administration’s efforts to rein in spending say it’s time to pull back funds first distributed at the height of the COVID crisis.

“Money was flooded all over the place,” said state Sen. Jim Runestad, a White Lake Republican.

President Trump was in his first term in the White House at the beginning of the pandemic spending, but Runestad has been a frequent critic of the Biden administration and what he describes as careless government spending designed to gain Democratic votes. 

“COVID is done,” Runestad said. The government should “claw back the money that they're pouring in every rat hole they can. If (public health departments want) something very narrow and specific, there should be a new allocation and clearly mark it for very specific things, like specifically a lab buildout — that makes some sense.”

Jim Rutherford, Kalamazoo County’s health officer, said the money was temporary from the outset, so he avoided making deep investments with it, like hiring staff. Rather, the department used it to buy reagents and other testing supplies.

“I knew the vulnerabilities of the money, so we didn’t want to hire a bunch of staff that we’d have to then let go,” he said.

All told, the state estimates that the six local health departments will lose about $512,000 per year, a combined total of more than $3 million. 

Still on the job

Certainly, some of the work continues. It’s just … harder.

In Newbury, lab staff will continue to work with a leaky roof. A long history of water-quality testing will continue in Gaylord, but the plan for larger-scale wastewater surveillance has been shelved. Saginaw County will continue to track disease, but without the planned-for epidemiologist, whose expertise would help blunt the spread of outbreaks and strategize for crises.

Much of the free respiratory disease testing — for flu, RSV and COVID-19, for example — for uninsured and underinsured residents has ended, too. And specimens collected from ill residents will be transferred to the Lansing lab, increasing report turnaround time.

The Michigan Department of Health and Human Services Bureau of Laboratories itself was not immune. The federal fund for the central lab has been reduced for “equipment maintenance contracts, data modernization and the ability to innovate lab processes in times of emerging disease response,” a state health department spokesperson told Bridge.

The suddenness of the cuts was especially disrupting for his department, said Derusha, a long-time public health leader in the Upper Peninsula.

Public funding fluctuates during regular budget cycles, he said.

“So you typically have months to prepare for whatever changes are coming; you can adjust your budget and align your operations. You can terminate contracts. You can do things in an orderly fashion,” he said.

This, he said, “happened so quickly.”