CDC wastewater surveillance funding drying up

Between 2021 and 2024, the federal government invested more than $500 million in COVID-19 relief spending for the project, but Congress has not yet allocated dedicated, non-emergency funding for the program.

A senior CDC official told the Washington Examiner that the Department of Health and Human Services is utilizing unspent COVID-era funds from prior years to keep the program operational, but the operating budget is thinning. The official said wastewater surveillance has become a critical part of preventing infectious disease outbreaks. 

CDC data indicate that wastewater surveillance has been an integral part of curbing and controlling measles outbreaks, as vaccine uptake for the highly infectious disease has declined in recent years. 

The United States had record-breaking numbers of measles infections last year, with nearly 2,300 cases and three deaths, according to the CDC. As of mid-May, there have been nearly 1,800 cases in 2026.

Measles can spread quickly in the days before and after a person develops symptoms, so a positive test from sewage allows public health officials time to prepare for cases and send additional resources to the affected area. That included personnel to help treat positive patients, as well as launching public awareness and vaccination campaigns. 

Several states, including New Mexico, Oregon, Colorado, and South Carolina, have relied upon wastewater testing to help curb recent measles outbreaks. 

The RAND Corporation estimated last year that the NWSS could generate a net benefit of nearly $1,500 per person in the first year of the next pandemic on the scale of COVID-19.

President Donald Trump’s budget request submitted to Congress in April requested more than $111 billion in discretionary budget authority for HHS for fiscal 2027, a 12.5% decrease from the enacted level in 2026. 

But funding for wastewater surveillance and the strengthening of the program has bipartisan support in Congress.

In March, Sens. Tim Scott (R-SC) and Cory Booker (D-NJ) introduced legislation to expand the wastewater surveillance program, directing the CDC to award grants to state and local jurisdictions to improve monitoring activities. 

The legislation, called the PREDICT Act, would require the CDC to produce a national strategic plan outlining how it will use surveillance as an early-warning system to detect emerging health threats and to improve data transparency by creating an interactive dashboard for information sharing by state and local public health officials.

When Scott asked HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. last month about the bill during his testimony before the Senate Finance Committee to make the case for the president’s budget, Kennedy pledged his support to work with Scott to advance the legislation.

“It’s something that’s very personally important to me to have more wastewater surveillance,” Kennedy said.

Several public health organizations last month, including the American Society for Microbiology and the Infectious Diseases Society of America, urged the House and Senate appropriations committees in a letter to provide “at least $120 million” to continue NWSS. 

“Data collected through NWSS provides timely, community-level insight into disease trends, allowing public health officials to detect increases or declines in infection earlier than traditional clinical surveillance,” the authors wrote. “This enables faster, more targeted responses, including resource allocation, public communication and mitigation efforts.” 

The American Jail Association, the American Public Health Association, the Big Cities Health Coalition, and the Council of State and Territorial Epidemiologists, among other groups, also signed the funding request letter.