According to Summit County Health Director Phil Bondurant, a 40% cut to the National Institutes of Health will affect his team one way or another. The local health department is 60% funded by federal grants.
“The entire public health network across our nation, and could be argued internationally, is being impacted by some of the decisions around trying to be more efficient,” he said on KPCW’s “Local News Hour” May 12. “That trickle-down effect has now made it to the local level.”
Some programs will survive, but he said others will be cut partially or entirely. But Bondurant doesn’t know which.
“All of the information that's being communicated to us at the local level and the state level comes by way, generally, of the same information that everybody else is learning through executive orders, through the news,” the health director said. “So here we are waiting for a July 1 date, which is generally when we know what our funding looks like for the next fiscal year — middle of May, and we still have not heard anything about what the future holds for our programming, other than there's a 40% cut to NIH.”
Bondurant said the department remains committed to its employees and the community. He added it will do everything it can to take care of its people if they do need to cut positions.
Summit County Manager Shayne Scott said there are “rainy day funds” the county can explore using.
“Depending on how bad it is, we may have to start talking about how we can lose folks to attrition, if that's necessary, how we might provide months of either pay or notice, if programs need to go away,” Scott told KPCW on “Local News Hour” May 13. “So it's really a troubling situation.”
Scott and Bondurant have been part of a staff group working to lay out a “runway” of sorts to smooth the transition into a period of austerity.
Bondurant has already directed staff to discontinue all but “absolutely necessary” spending.
Summit County’s health department is separate from its behavioral health services, which cover mental healthcare and addiction treatment for residents, especially people with public insurance and those in the court system.
Chief Behavioral Health Officer Aaron Newman won’t know his federal funding until October, but he said his programs appear to be more insulated from federal cuts than the health department.
“In fact, what you'll see is we're getting more money from the feds for prevention services than we've ever received,” he told the Summit County Council May 7.
But that only amounts to a projected 2% increase in prevention funding for FY2026. Newman is projecting a 15% decrease in mental health services money and a 10% decrease for substance use disorder services.
On the substance use side, Newman said clinical services may not be impacted, but the county’s “drug court” to rehabilitate nonviolent offenders will. He’s reaching out to state partners and looking elsewhere in his budget to make up the more than $20,000 shortfall.
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