Amid pandemic, Georgia is not boosting spending on public health

ATLANTA — Appearing before state lawmakers last week, Georgia’s public health commissioner acknowledged the strain on her agency from the coronavirus pandemic.

“This,” Dr. Kathleen Toomey said, “is probably the most challenging thing all of us have ever done.”

But Toomey wasn’t seeking state money to expand laboratory capacity at the Department of Public Health. Or to replace its decade-old disease-tracking system. Or to hire more epidemiologists, scientists and other specialists who could help contain not just this coronavirus but whatever public health crisis emerges next.

Amid a pandemic that has killed more than 11,500 Georgians and sickened more than 720,000, Toomey’s boss, Gov. Brian Kemp, proposed only a minuscule increase in the state’s public health budget for the next fiscal year: about $900,000, or threetenths of 1%. None of the new money addresses the pandemic. But nearly $200,000 would fund a licensing program for tattoo parlors.

Kemp’s budget plan continues a longestablished trend in Georgia. If lawmakers follow his recommendations, the state will spend 13% less per resident on public health in the coming year than it did a decade ago.

“It assumes this will be a short-term problem, and the federal government will be there to pay for it,” said Amber Schmidtke, a public health researcher who has worked at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and taught at Mercer University.

“It’s clear,” Schmidtke said, “that the leadership of this state for many years has not prioritized public health.”

In a news conference on Jan. 12, Kemp said the agency is adequately funded to respond to the pandemic through testing and vaccinations.

“We have the bandwidth to do what we need to do,” Kemp said. “We will use every resource, human and financial.”

Georgia ranks 37th among the states in public health spending per resident. It advanced from 39th over the past decade only because of budget cuts in other states.

Most years, almost three-fifths of Georgia’s public health budget comes from the federal government, most of it through grants administered by the CDC. In recent years, Congress has cut the CDC’s budget, shrinking the grants to Georgia and other states.

During the pandemic, Georgia has relied heavily on federal money. Since last spring, the state has collected a little more than $1 billion in additional federal funding, which has paid for such virus-related expenses as private lab testing, operations of the state’s labs, temporary “surge” staffing, personal protective equipment and an isolation unit for people who contracted the coronavirus.