ASPPH Broken Lifelines: The Economic Consequences of Defunding Academic Public Health
The Association of Schools and Programs of Public Health (ASPPH) has released Broken Lifelines, a new report outlining how recent federal funding cuts are harming academic public health. The report highlights the deep economic, institutional, and workforce impacts of the 2025 budget disruptions and why restoring federal investment is critical to the nation’s health and preparedness.
What’s at Stake?
Federal cuts to academic public health are threatening the core infrastructure that protects our nation’s health and drives economic and workforce growth. A wave of budget cuts, grant freezes, and agency restructurings in 2025 is destabilizing institutions, disrupting research, shuttering community clinics, and jeopardizing the training pipeline for the future public health workforce. The economic, human, and national consequences are profound.
Academic public health is far more than classroom instruction or laboratory research. At ASPPH, it is a network of more than 155 institutions representing over 103,000 faculty, staff, and students who train the workforce, conduct lifesaving research, and engage with communities across the country and the world. ASPPH member institutions are also powerful economic engines, generating billions in activity and creating jobs while improving population health.
But recent policy shifts are putting all of this at risk. Massive National Institutes of Health (NIH) and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) budget cuts and abrupt grant cancellations are triggering job losses at major universities, pausing lifesaving research, and reducing public health services.
Impacts Across the Country
From Boston and Baltimore to rural Texas and California’s Central Valley, these funding cuts have economic shockwaves that are wide-reaching:
Job Losses
Johns Hopkins University laid off 2,200 staff due to research funding cuts. Harvard Medical School is facing a $2.2 billion freeze, which will affect hiring and programs. NIH funding supports over 400,000 jobs nationwide.
Closed Clinics
Due to stalled funding, community health centers in at least 10 states were forced to reduce services or temporarily shut down. In Richmond, VA, a federally supported center closed three locations.
Disrupted Training
Students lost federal traineeships, internships were canceled, and schools scaled back admissions, threatening the future workforce pipeline.
Economic Damage
Every $1 of NIH funding supports $2.56 in economic activity. The 2025 downturn is projected to result in $16 billion in lost output and over 68,000 jobs lost nationally.
Halted Community-Level Projects
Those tackling opioid addiction, infectious disease outbreaks, and health disparities are some of the ones impacted.
Even our nation’s most prestigious and well-funded institutions are not immune. Without stable and equitable federal funding, their reach, impact, and capacity are severely diminished.
Our Broken Lifelines report documents these economic and human consequences, including regional impacts, disrupted public health services, and the broader threat to the nation’s resilience and preparedness.
How ASPPH Members are Impacted: Program-by-Program Breakdown
The crisis also includes sweeping changes to federal public health agencies that directly support ASPPH members. To better understand the direct implications of federal policy changes on public health schools and programs, ASPPH has also prepared a Federal Funding Fact Sheet outlining how academic public health institutions, from the CDC to the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), are affected program-by-program.
This companion document outlines:
- Agency-specific impacts at the CDC, NIH, the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA), the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), and USAID
- Consequences for training centers, student practica, and diversity programs
- ASPPH’s advocacy efforts in Congress and the courts to restore funding and protect essential public health infrastructure
Our Call to Action
The evidence is clear: defunding academic public health undermines economic growth, jeopardizes health, and weakens our capacity to respond to current and future crises. The Broken Lifelines report makes an urgent case for why public health funding is not just a budget line but is a national necessity.
ASPPH calls on policymakers, partners, and the public to:
Restore and protect stable federal funding for public health education, research, and services
Recognize academic public health institutions as essential to national health security and economic strength
Ensure that policy decisions do not jeopardize the health, prosperity, and safety of our communities
This is not just about schools and programs of public health, but it’s about people and the communities we live in, and whether we can all have a healthy future.
View our press release about the report’s release.