The Maine Center for Disease Control and Prevention will lay off at least 40 subcontracted workers as a result of federal cutbacks announced last week, reducing capacity in a number of public health services, including vaccine distribution, infectious disease tracking and outbreak management.

Sara Gagne-Holmes, commissioner of Maine’s Department of Health and Human Services, said in a written statement that termination of six federal grants “will compromise Maine’s ability to respond to disease outbreaks, maintain vaccine availability, address health disparities and support community-based health workforce efforts.”

Last week, state officials said $91 million in federal contracts were abruptly canceled, but details on how those cuts would impact state agencies was unknown.

The bulk of the contract terminations at Maine DHHS — $88 million — fell on the Maine CDC. The remaining $3 million included cuts to initiatives to combat substance use disorder.

“These actions jeopardize critical public health response capabilities and services, and weaken our state’s public health infrastructure,” Dr. Puthiery Va, Maine CDC director, said in a written statement.

The contracts include services that assisted the Maine CDC in vaccine distribution, public education, disease monitoring and response, laboratory testing, outbreak management, asthma education, rural health services and reducing inequities among vulnerable populations, such as minorities and rural residents.

The Maine CDC has about 500 employees.

The Maine funding is part of an $11 billion cut to state and local health agencies nationwide that slashed funding for programs that were initially created during the COVID-19 pandemic, but that have had broader public health uses.

The affected workers include employees of nonprofit agencies that subcontract their services to Maine CDC.

MCD Global Health, a Hallowell-based nonprofit, is one of those subcontractors.

Kate Martin, spokesperson for MCD, said the agency “was informed by Maine DHHS that several of our contracts with the state have been impacted by U.S. DHHS cuts to public health funding. We are still assessing the full scope of what this means for our employees and their work.”

“We are concerned about the potentially adverse impact that these cuts in federal support for public health initiatives could have on Maine residents,” Martin said.

MCD has partnered with Maine CDC for more than 50 years, and provides a wide array of services, including suicide prevention, maternal health and AIDS response.

MCD’s work with the federal government’s humanitarian aid programs is also threatened, as a multimillion dollar contract with USAID for public health work in Africa is in jeopardy.

One former Maine CDC subcontract worker, who asked that she not be identified because she wasn’t authorized to speak for the agency, said that she worked as a disease outbreak investigator at long-term care facilities. The position helped Maine respond to COVID-19 and other disease outbreaks, while preparing the state for future pandemics, she said.

Meanwhile, the state’s Office of Behavioral Health is determining how to handle $3 million in federal cutbacks, including to youth substance use prevention and recovery, and programs that responded to first episodes of psychosis.

For the behavioral health services, Maine’s DHHS will “reevaluate existing resources to ensure the continuity of these essential services.”

Also last week, in addition to public health cuts to state and local agencies, the U.S. DHHS announced it was slashing its federal workforce from 82,000 to 62,000, part of the Trump administration’s wide-ranging efforts to reduce the size of the federal workforce.

Without providing evidence, the Trump administration characterized the cuts and affected programs as examples of wasteful spending.

“The pandemic is over, and HHS will no longer waste billions of taxpayer dollars responding to a nonexistent pandemic that Americans moved on from years ago.”