New York City public health officials, community advocates, and Democratic state lawmakers are praising the partial restoration of funding earmarked for vital public health services in New York City after Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Gov. Kathy Hochul reached an agreement on his $127 billion preliminary budget for the next fiscal year.
The arrangement includes what’s referred to as Article 6 of the Public Health Law and is supposed to restore $60 million in core public health services from an original $90 million that was cut under former Gov. Andrew Cuomo in 2019. It’s part of a broader funding package of $1.5 billion in additional state operating support that was agreed upon for New York City over two years.
There’s still a $5.4 billion gap over the next two fiscal years, and City Hall will need to work with Albany to figure out how to plug the hole. (Mamdani said that only two options are available — persuade Hochul to tax the richest New Yorkers or raise the city’s property taxes.)
The budget proposal is to take effect July 1 after negotiations and revisions with the City Council.
It’s too soon to say how the Article 6 money will be spent specifically on New York City public health efforts, but news of its potential restoration brought some relief to public health corners after successive New York City health commissioners and community advocates had spent the past several years trying to unblock it.
“We’re still getting the details here, but what a massive victory,” acting Health Commissioner and Chief Medical Officer Dr. Michelle Morse told Healthbeat last week. “I can’t think of a more strategic time for the match to be restored, because we do have so many threats to public health, and long-term resources from the CDC, frankly, are still a bit in flux.”
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has long provided critical support for state and local public health programs across the United States, but millions of dollars have been withheld since Donald Trump returned to office. Last year, New York City’s Health Department saw more than $100 million in federal funding slashed from its budget. The money had funded a public health lab that conducted testing for pathogens like measles, tuberculosis, rabies, and bird flu.
Dr. Michelle Morse to continue health equity work in refocusing on CMO role
In his remarks at a news conference last week about the budget plan, Mamdani briefly noted the changes: “Much of this state assistance reverses longstanding Cuomo-era cost shifts.”
Through Article 6, local health departments pay for public health work ranging from immunizations to infectious disease surveillance, and the state picks up the rest of the tab. The state provides each municipality that delivers core public health services with a base grant of $750,000, or $1.30 per capita for larger municipalities like New York City. Beyond the grant, the state reimburses localities for 36% of the cost of core public health services.
As a result of the 2019 cut, New York City was only reimbursed for 20% of those services. That means that the city had to cover 80% of their cost, not 64%. Advocates say that the cut is especially punitive for a city with a large, diverse population that bears a disproportionate burden of the state’s public health costs.
The Cuomo administration justified the cut with the argument that New York City receives some funding directly from the federal government. Advocates countered that the cuts had unfairly stemmed from a strained relationship between Cuomo and former Mayor Bill de Blasio.
Assembly Member Jessica González-Rojas, a Queens Democrat who sponsored a bill that sought to restore the equal reimbursement rates, welcomed the decision. She and City Council Health Committee Chair Lynn Schulman had pushed for their return.
“We’ve been fighting to restore that funding for a number of years now. And, yeah, I’m just really thrilled that it’s happening,” González-Rojas told Healthbeat. “It took a lot of lobbying from those of us that cared deeply about this issue.”
Advocates say the cuts had cost the city $90 million each year, hampering the Health Department’s ability to deliver and expand certain services such as tuberculosis control, which calls for extensive resources.
Preventative screenings for communicable diseases like TB is just one of the things Carlos Arnao, director of the healthy communities program at the New York Immigration Coalition in Manhattan, said he would like to see the funding go toward.
Arnao called the partial restoration “a really great start, and it signals a willingness to at least talk about a full restoration,” he told Healthbeat.
He said the money could also go toward vaccine education and outreach programs at a time of confusing and false information coming from the federal government. It could also go toward addressing maternal and infant mortality rates in the Caribbean community, and toward homeless outreach, he said, citing the recent multi-week cold spell that resulted in at least 20 deaths.
Trenton Daniel is a reporter covering public health in New York for Healthbeat. Contact Trenton at tdaniel@healthbeat.org oron the messaging app Signal at trentondaniel.88.
