Key staffers tasked with tracking infectious diseases, providing health care and connecting residents of Utah’s most populous county to services are on their way out at the Salt Lake County Health Department.
The reason: a Trump Administration decision this week to claw back $11.4 billion in COVID-19-related funding from state and local health departments across the nation. While the money was doled out in response to the pandemic, not all of the funds were supporting COVID-specific work. The funding had been scheduled to continue until next year.
In Salt Lake County, that’s forced the layoffs of 17 employees, including epidemiologists, nurses and community health workers. It’s “not easy to absorb” the loss of such experts, spokesperson Nicholas Rupp said, as the department tries to safeguard public health.
“It’s going to be difficult. We are going to cover those areas as best we can,” Rupp said. “... Losing epidemiologists means the remaining epidemiologists will have more diseases to track, right? It’s the same amount of work spread over fewer people.”
At the Utah Department of Health and Human Services, the jobs of 37 employees in positions funded by the COVID-related grants will end April 11, the agency announced Friday. The state said it had expected to receive an additional approximately $98 million before the funding period was set to end in 2026.
A total of 187 staff positions, many of them temporary, were funded partially or completely by six coronavirus-related grants that Utah received and have now ended, it said.
Director Tracy Gruber said the agency was “sorry to see these positions end early. We consider them all public health heroes, many of whom joined our department when we needed to ramp up operations to keep Utahns safe during the global pandemic. These staff came in to serve the public at an incredibly difficult time.”
Read the full report at sltrib.com.
This article is published through the Utah News Collaborative, a partnership of news organizations in Utah that aims to inform readers across the state.