Burlco must halt renovation of its health building after losing $1.1 million from DOGE cuts
“They are now scrambling. It’s been a really challenging moment," said an executive of a health nonprofit.
Stymied by unexpected Trump administration cuts, Burlington County officials continue to explore their options to complete refurbishments of the building housing the county’s health department.
The department has spent around $5 million of the more than $6 million it would cost to finish the work on the building in Westampton, said county spokesperson David Levinsky. Federal grant money had been earmarked for the project, which was started last June.
Burlington County was notified by the New Jersey Department of Health on March 28 that the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) would not reimburse the county for any work done after that day, meaning the county would be short more than $1 million to complete the refurbishments, according to Linda Brown, executive director of the New Jersey Association of County and City Health Officials (NJACCHO). The nonprofit is an organization of municipal and county public health leaders and allied health professionals.
Without the money reserved for the completion of building renovations, the work is just three-quarters done, Levinsky said.
“They are now scrambling,” Brown said of Burlington County. “It’s been a really challenging moment.”
The county is contemplating possible alternatives “for how to complete the project,” Levinsky said.
Other South Jersey counties have also seen their funding terminated, Brown said, adding that the effects are being assessed. “I don’t yet have confirmed losses at this time.”
By order of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), $11.4 billion in COVID-era funding that was slated for grants to state and county public health departments and nonprofit groups nationwide was cut on March 24. Of that amount, $350 million was to have gone to New Jersey, a spokesperson for the New Jersey Department of Health said.
Normally, money flows from the federal government to the New Jersey Department of Health, which in turn allots the money to the NJACCHO for use in local health departments, Brown said. The organization had been distributing these funds statewide since October 2022 from two federal grants before DOGE stepped in.
In a statement last month, HHS officials said, “The COVID-19 pandemic is over, and HHS will no longer waste billions of taxpayer dollars responding to a non-existent pandemic that Americans moved on from years ago.”
But the money was being used for much more than treating COVID-19, health officials said.
New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy called the cuts “irrational and inexplicable” in a statement on March 31. The elimination of money for heath departments creates an “unfillable void in funding that will have disastrous ramifications for our most vulnerable neighbors,” Murphy said.
To combat the cuts, 23 states — including New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Delaware — filed a lawsuit in federal court in Rhode Island against the Trump administration on April 1.
Triggering “chaos,” the administration terminated critical public health funding with “no advance … warning,” the lawsuit maintains.
The New Jersey Department of Health uses this funding to support 94 local health departments to cover staff; data infrastructure; community outreach and education; infectious disease preparedness; coordination and crisis response; renovations and facility improvements; and professional development and training, according to the lawsuit.
On April 3, a federal judge said she will temporarily block the Trump administration from cutting the money. It is not clear how that affects Burlington County.
Built in 1975, the Burlington County Health Department building has not undergone any significant improvements since. “Modernizing the building became a priority use for the grant funds,” Levinsky, the county spokesperson, said.
The grant was being used to improve clinic space, and to create more offices, boardrooms, and storage areas, Levinsky said.
He added that none of the approximately 70 workers there have had to leave the building during renovations.
The clinic is used for numerous programs, Levinsky said, including child immunizations, COVID and flu vaccine clinics, HIV/STD testing, counseling and treatment, pregnancy testing, and Access to Reproductive Care and HIV (ARCH) nursing services.