Health officials say federal cuts will hurt Texas’ measles response

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The Trump administration this week announced plans to clawback $11 billion in pandemic-era grants that could harm local Texas public health departments as they battle a historic measles outbreak.

In Lubbock, where many of the 40 Texans infected with measles have been hospitalized, grant funding affected by the announcement has paid for an epidemiologist who has directly responded to the measles outbreak in West Texas that has killed a 6-year-old girl. In Dallas, the grant funding was helping to equip a biolaboratory that will support more testing for pathogens, including measles.

“It’s kind of crazy to have this funding cut,” said Lubbock’s public health director Katherine Wells. “I don’t have a savings account in public health.”

The Trump administration confirmed Tuesday that it was going to eliminate funding that had been created to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic, prioritizing instead on projects that address chronic diseases and the president’s Make America Healthy Again initiative. Much of that funding, however, has been used to pay for infrastructure to respond to infectious diseases other than COVID, including measles, local health officials have said.

The Texas Department of State Health Services notified public health departments late Tuesday of the federal government’s plans. State officials have not provided specifics on how much money is cut or how many health departments are impacted.

“DSHS was notified that the federal grant funding for Immunization/COVID, Epidemiology Laboratory Capacity (ELC/COVID), and Health Disparities/COVID, is terminated as of March 24, 2025,” according to the the notice from the agency’s associate commissioner Imelda Garcia. “The Texas Department of State Health Services (DSHS or System Agency) is issuing this notice to pause all activities immediately. Please do not accrue any additional costs as of the date of this notice.”

Wells said the funding cut will impact her office’s work combating the spread of measles. Lubbock has been using three grants to help pay for extra temporary staff, a part-time nurse and a full-time epidemiologist to help with vaccinations, answering phones and working with testing of patients. Two of the city’s three grants were not set to expire until 2026.

Ten of the state’s 327 measles cases have been confirmed in Lubbock and 226 cases have been in Gaines County, about 90 minutes southwest of Lubbock.

This measles outbreak has further exposed Texas’ threadbare public health system.

The grants, she said, allowed her to hire eight people to help shoulder the workload the outbreak has brought. Since January, Lubbock hospitals have treated many of the more than 300 patients infected with measles, including a 6-year-old who died on Feb. 26.

“We’re trying to figure it out,” Wells said. But with state and federal funds cut, city and county health department that counted on those COVID-19 era grants for new programs and outreach will now have to go to local taxpayers to help shore up the abrupt shortfall.

Dallas County has already broken ground on a $52 million biolab to help combat future health threats. Their health director, Dr. Philip Huang, said the grant money Dallas County had received was going to be used to help equip that new lab.

“It was a lot of equipment,” Huang said. “These machines can help with COVID but these machines also help with our preparedness and ability to test a lot of other pathogens ... including measles.”

Like Wells, he and other public health officials are now going to have to determine how to still move forward without this funding.

“The things that we're doing and using the funds for COVID have great implications for our future preparedness for everything else so we’re not in the same situation at the start of COVID,” he said. “We had seen how little investment there had been in public health, so it’s very short sighted to say, ‘OK, well these were COVID funds it’s over.’ It’s not.”

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