WHERE HAS IT ALL GONE?

Congress has allocated unprecedented funding to state health departments to respond to the pandemic. Most of that money was allocated to CDC who then passed those funds to state governments (mostly state health departments). State agencies then decide how much of those funds to keep for themselves and how much to pass through to the county health departments and other stakeholders and entities.

This week the CDC posted a new tool that discloses how much each state has received from each funding category. You can search the new tool by state, congressional act, name of the funding award, and funding category. Under each of those categories, you can drill down more deeply into the programmatic areas that have received the money.

Of course, CDC doesn’t tell you the ultimate destination of the money in each state. Because our individual state agencies have not been transparent about how these funds have been spent (little is available on the ADHS or other state agency websites about the uses of these funds), one would need to search the ADOA’s State Procurement Office website to find out who has received these funds, what the funds were spent on, and how many of the contracts were ‘no-bid’ (like this multi-million dollar ADHS no-bid ‘competition impractical’ contract to Diaz and Associates).

So far, state government (mostly the ADHS) has received more than one billion dollars ($1,000,000,000) from the CDC from various supplemental funding initiatives. State government and the ADHS have received this funding through:

  • The Coronavirus Preparedness and Response Supplemental Appropriations Act, 2020 ($485,000,000);

  • American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 ($362,000,000);

  • Paycheck Protection Program and Health Care Enhancement Act ($151,000,000);

  • Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act ($24,000,000); and

  • Coronavirus Response and Relief Supplemental Appropriations Act, 2021 ($24,000,000).

As I mentioned, we don’t know how these funds were used, what entities received them, and how much of the money has been allocated and spent.

However, an enterprising journalist interested in government accountability could become an expert in the state’s procurement website and shed some light on this important topic for the people of Arizona.

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