A week after a federal spending freeze was halted, some early childhood education programs in West Virginia are still having trouble drawing down money.
The West Virginia Head Start Association had three programs each submit a request to draw down funds from their Head Start grant through the U.S. Health and Human Services Payment Management System on Jan. 29 and Jan. 31, last week.
“While these requests are normally processed in under 24 hours, they have yet to receive those funds,” said Lori Milam, executive director of the West Virginia Head Start Association.
The Head Start programs for early childhood education draw down money to operate on an as-needed basis, rather than receiving operational dollars in the form of one large check at the beginning of the grant year.
The federal payment management system “acts like an ATM and disburses funding gradually after we request it – and not very far in advance,” Milam said.
“Of course, this disruption from the normal causes a great deal of anxiety and stress among our staff and the community,” Milam said. “However, at the end of the day, we are most concerned about the impact this will have on the children we serve, their families, and the communities where we operate.”
The Trump administration’s Office of Management and Budget issued a directive early last week to “temporarily pause all activities related to obligation or disbursement of all Federal financial assistance.” The OMB memo said the review was necessary to assure federal spending reflects the priorities of the incoming Trump administration.
Within a day, a federal judge ordered a halt to the freeze. The same judge, this week, held the order in place and directed the administration to show by this Friday how it’s complying.
At the center of the hearing was a small nonprofit that helps West Virginians with disabilities live in their own homes. The nonprofit is normally reimbursed by the Department of Health and Human Services on a rolling basis as is needed to pay immediate bills. The name of the nonprofit was redacted in the court filing.
U.S. District Judge Loren AliKhan questioned whether other organizations like the West Virginia nonprofit have been unable to draw down timely funds.
“Every day that the (funding) pause continues to ripple across the country is an additional day that Americans are being denied access to programs that heal them, house them, and them,” she wrote.
Other organizations that depend on federal dollars have, similarly, described disruptions. In Virginia, for example, community health centers have been describing a cutoff from federal grant money that has meant halting some services and closing some locations.
Senator Shelley Moore Capito, R-W.Va., said her office has been fielding concerns from organizations that have experienced disruption of federal dollars.
“Today we had the community health centers — the Primary Care Association was here talking about school-based health clinics and community health centers, which you know delivers healthcare to about half a million West Virginians,” Capito said in a briefing today with West Virginia reporters.
“It was interesting because I asked them, is anybody having trouble with their payment, have you had a reject or you can’t get through the system? Only one of the ones that were there said that they had. What was interesting about it was all the same grant program that they were all applying for.”
Capito wondered if the disruption might have been because of more recent issues with the Health and Human Services delivery system. “The IT system was down this morning, separate and apart from what’s been going on the last week and a half in terms of the halt that the president put onto his OMB.
The senator said her office is working through problems with West Virginia connections on a case by case basis.
“So I think a lot of this is getting resolved and but the after lasting confusion still is residing in a lot of these areas. So that’s where I say ‘clumsy.’ Sometimes it’s working, sometimes it’s not,” Capito said.