Howard Gamble

WHEELING — Wheeling-Ohio County Health Administrator Howard Gamble hasn’t seen any effects locally of the federal government’s major job cuts at numerous health agencies — at least not yet.

But Gamble is still concerned that, even though the effects haven’t yet trickled down to the local level, the impacts from those cuts are on the way, and he’s not yet sure what they’ll be.

“I am nervous at this county health department, as an administrator,” he said. “I’m very nervous, and here’s why: anytime you have the potential for disease — let’s say it’s the rise in measles cases, or it’s an unknown flu variant … or it’s other diseases out there. The concern on a local level is, if this escalates, I only have so many staff at a county health department to respond and respond quickly.

“We rely on the state health department, and in cases, I also rely on the federal CDC to assist us in times where we have a very time-sensitive response to a disease,” Gamble added.

Mass layoffs at several agencies across the United States Department of Health and Human Services came earlier this week, cutting 10,000 federal employees overall from the rosters. Among them were 873 jobs at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, 185 of those coming from the Morgantown office.

Other cuts included 3,500 jobs with the Food & Drug Administration, 2,400 jobs at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 1,200 jobs at the National Institutes for Health and 300 jobs at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

What complicates matters at the local level, Gamble said, is that he and other county and municipal health administrators aren’t sure what jobs in each of those agencies are gone. They could be clerical positions, important for the federal agencies themselves, but not positions that local health departments interact with often. They could be administrative positions.

Gamble hopes that the majority aren’t boots-on-the-ground jobs that he and other local administrators do talk to.

“County health departments are concerned, when you begin to thin out the workforce, are we going to lose a contact or the ability for them to respond to us quickly if we have a problem?” Gamble said. “And that’s where our concern is, are we going to have a potential lag and response?”

There more possible effects of those federal cuts that can hit local agencies through state health departments, Gamble said. Local agencies rely heavily on state departments and those departments are heavily reliant on federal funding for their services. If the support dwindles to the states from the federal HHS, the states will have to cut back.

Gamble returned to the measles example. Counties get immunization funding from the states, which gets that funding from the federal government. Gamble said he has already heard anecdotally that he and other local agencies should expect a reduction in that funding.

“Those are dollars that are tied to us for us to employ a nurse, for example, to vaccinate (people), or to reimburse us for that nurse that we use to vaccinate (people),” Gamble said.

Gamble said it will take some time to figure out what affects the federal job cuts will have on his county department. His biggest concern is whether he’ll be able to get rapid responses to problems in Ohio County.

One thing he does know is that, when cuts are made in the health field, there will impacts at the local level.

“Anytime you have a reduction from one of the prominent health health authorities in the world, like the CDC,” he said, “you get concerned.”