CT suing Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to stop funding cuts Dems say will kill children, parents

Hartford Courant – Tuesday, April 1, 2025
By Christopher Keating

Seeking to block $175 million in public health cuts, Connecticut joined 22 other states Tuesday in a lawsuit against health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and the federal health department.

State Attorney General William Tong filed the suit with colleagues in California, New York, Massachusetts and other Democratic-leaning states to stop $11 billion in cuts nationwide that the lawsuit says were made “abruptly and arbitrarily” last week with no advance warning.

Connecticut’s share of the total includes $175 million for items including grants to the public health department and funds for newborn screenings, childhood immunizations, and surveillance of disease outbreaks, among others. In addition to public health, the grants cover mental health and addiction services.

The lawsuit charges that the money was allocated during the coronavirus pandemic, but Kennedy declared that the funds were no longer needed because the pandemic was over.

Senate President Pro Tempore Martin Looney of New Haven and other Democrats spoke directly in stark terms about the cuts.

“People will die as a result of this proposed federal cut,” Looney told reporters at the state Capitol complex in Hartford. “Children will die. Parents of young families will die. Those who are in frail health will die. Elderly people will die. That’s what this is all about if the attorney general and his colleagues are not successful in reversing this decision. This is one of the most appalling things I have ever heard — the government turning against its own people and the neediest and most vulnerable of its own people.”

But House Republican leader Vincent Candelora said that Democrats need to focus more on the spending problems in Hartford and not Washington, D.C.

“Nothing frustrates Democrats in this building more than the thought of fiscal responsibility,” Candelora said. “Their exaggerated doomsday predictions over the federal government reclaiming COVID legacy grants prove it. Worse, they obsess over President Trump to distract from the real crisis — chaos in Connecticut’s budget. These immediate problems stem not from Washington but from Connecticut Democrats’ own policies and their failure to adjust the budget last spring. If they truly cared about their constituents, they’d focus on tackling spending overruns and reining in their costly ‘freebie’ programs that are draining funds from core government services.”

Rep. Cristin McCarthy Vahey, a Fairfield Democrat who co-chairs the legislature’s public health committee, said the programs receiving the grants “now have an uncertain future” across the state. Overall, 45 local health departments whose staff members help spread the word about immunizations “no longer have the capacity to do so.”

“How can we continue this work? We can’t without those funds,” she said.

Following Looney’s remarks, McCarthy Vahey told a personal story that had a major impact last year on her family.

“Although I may sound like a broken record, and my colleagues standing behind me have heard me say this many times, I’m here to say that it can happen to your family, too,” she said. “Senator Looney, you talked about losing young parents. That’s what happened in my family. We lost my 43-year-old brother-in-law to the flu. The flu can be mitigated and prevented thanks to vaccinations. When we don’t have the infrastructure funding, when we don’t have the resources to communicate and beat back the misinformation that is all over, people will die. And families will suffer the kind of grief that my sister and her family have suffered.”

She added, “We stand here knowing that we can do something to stop it. But the federal government stands by and shrugs.”

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