Metro Nashville joins lawsuit against federal government again — this time over sudden public health cuts

Metro Nashville and a handful of other local governments are suing the U.S. Health and Human Services Department. The agency cut $11 billion in local public health funding — without warning — earlier this year.

The lawsuit argues that the cuts are illegal, and it asks the court to reinstate the funding.

The immediate cancellation caused sudden layoffs and program cuts across the country. In Nashville, that included canceled measles vaccine clinics, as well as an end to some services for the homeless community and processing in the county’s public health lab.

“So the order came down to shut down the (lab testing) program immediately that day — that no further work would be paid for by the federal government,” said Metro’s legal director, Wally Deitz. “That means some Nashvillians who took lab tests and are waiting back for lab results may not get them because of the federal shutdown.”

It also raises several bigger-picture issues. For example, it argues agencies like HHS don’t have the power to make cuts like this. The U.S. Constitution gives that power to Congress, which passed laws to create these grants and how the government can spend the money. Attorneys say it would be illegal for agencies to spend that money anywhere else.

Nashville is already embroiled in a similar lawsuit over other money. The Trump administration has made widespread cuts to transit funding using similar methods.

“Nashville and cities all over the United States are using every tool available, including the courts, to stand up for the people we serve and restore critical programs that were lawfully funded,” Mayor Freddie O’Connell said.

The other plaintiffs are governments that serve Harris County, Texas; Kansas City, Missouri; and Columbus, Ohio. A union that covers government workers — The American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees — also joined the lawsuit.

Attorneys make several allegations that the cuts are illegal, and not only because HHS is disobeying Congress on how to spend the money. They say the agency’s stated reasoning for the cuts — that the COVID-19 pandemic is over — runs afoul of the laws that created the funding.

“Defendants announced that they would ‘no longer waste billions of taxpayer dollars responding to a non-existent pandemic that Americans moved on from years ago,'” the complaint reads in part. “Congress did not limit this funding to the period of the COVID-19 emergency nor even to COVID-19-specific projects. Instead, motivated by the fact that public health departments were unprepared for the COVID-19 pandemic, Congress made wide-ranging investments in U.S. public health infrastructure designed to extend beyond the immediate public health emergency.”

The lawsuit offers several examples from the public health funding laws Congress passed. Those measures say the money can be used to improve local governments’ public health data surveillance and analytics infrastructure, to increase vaccine confidence and vaccination rates, and to expand the country’s local public health workforces.

Nashville specifically had a contract renewal for $8 million that was meant to last through July 31, 2026, according to the complaint. It’s unclear how much of that has been spent, and how much of it will disappear if the lawsuit fails to block the cuts.

Several pandemic-era policies were designed to apply only while the federal government was still in a state of public health emergency. The government expanded that emergency from 2020 to 2023. Shortly after it ended, the lawsuit states, Congress did reverse several laws and cancel about $27 billion in pandemic funding. They argue that if all of this money was supposed to go away when the health emergency period ended, it would have been canceled back then.

The lawsuit noted that on paperwork for canceling the grants, HHS listed the cancellations as “for cause.” Usually, attorneys say, this means that a grantee did something wrong and failed to comply with contract requirements. That’s something these jurisdictions can get in trouble for.

Attorneys pointed to Nashville specifically. The state of Tennessee requires grant applicants to prove they haven’t had any contracts canceled for cause in the past three years.

“A failure to so certify may make Nashville less competitive for future grant awards,” the lawsuit said.