2 weeks Ago By Kristen Schorsch
As the Chicago Department of Public Health braces for a shrinking budget next year, some of Mayor Brandon Johnson’s promises to help people become healthier are being scaled back. There are currently no plans in 2025 to reopen more mental health clinics that were closed years ago. Instead, the city plans to continue to bring services to where people are or lean on connections with other organizations.
For example, nurses already visiting families with newborns can also screen for everything from depression and traumatic exposure to domestic violence and access to guns in the home. “The capital investment that is necessary for more locations, we don’t have in 2025,” Chicago Public Health Commissioner Dr. Simbo Ige said in an interview with WBEZ.
“But we want to fulfill our mental health service expansion promise by leveraging other assets to bring services closer to people.” The city also plans to retool what had been a bold plan to have so-called CARE teams of behavioral health professionals and EMTs respond to 911 mental health calls without police. The public health department has hired 17 EMTs rather than up to 55 EMTs — a reduction that’s a product of hiring challenges and the reality of soon-to-expire grant dollars.
Instead of teams being assigned to a district, they would work in multiple locations, with Ige anticipating teams would operate citywide by January. Going forward, Ige said she’s hopeful the city can keep some part of the program, but that will depend on how much the county and state can help. The program has also faced pushback — the firefighters’ union has argued removing their paramedics is a violation of their contract .
There is some additional help on the way. Johnson is proposing $1.5 million to create a 14-person dispatch unit to take mental health-related 911 calls within the Office of Emergency Management and Communications.
Ige is about a year into a tough job. Johnson fired her predecessor , Dr. Allison Arwady, who led the city through the COVID-19 pandemic for then-Mayor Lori Lightfoot.
In 2019, researchers found that Chicago had the largest life expectancy gap across neighborhoods in America — around 30 years. But the city’s public health department, the main city agency tasked with reducing health equities to help Chicagoans have longer, healthier lives, is largely funded by grants. That makes programs vulnerable to cuts when money runs out.
There’s another looming fiscal threat: the potential loss of more money under a Donald Trump administration. Vaccine skeptic Robert Kennedy Jr. is one of Trump’s top advisers.
Ige said the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which provides much of CDPH’s funding, is under threat of budget cuts. “If CDC doesn’t get funding, we don’t get funding,” Ige said. In 2025, Johnson’s proposed budget for CDPH is around $700 million — the bulk of the money is $608 million in grants that includes pandemic relief dollars.
Governments across the country are bracing for money to disappear, as their COVID-19 funds must be spent by the end of 2026. During a budget hearing on Thursday, Ige revealed a giant fiscal cliff looming for CDPH — more than $500 million in one-time grants are set to end in 2026. Overall, the total estimated budget for CDPH would be 22% less in 2025 compared to this year .
But it would still be far more than in 2019, the year before COVID-19 hit, when CDPH’s budget totaled around $177 million, according to that year’s appropriation ordinance. During the hearing, alderpersons peppered Ige with concerns about persistent vacancies particularly in mental health roles, funding for HIV, how to protect Chicagoans from extreme heat and monitoring air quality, among other issues. Ald.
Daniel La Spata, 1st Ward, pointed out that about 40 out of 280 vacancies at CDPH looked to be the same as last year. Ige detailed a common struggle in public health systems: not paying enough. She told alders around 100 people rejected job offers this year for better offers.
A psychologist working for the city would make around $90,000, but they can earn four times more in private practice, Ige said. So the city is recruiting psychiatric nurses instead of doctors, for example, to staff mental health clinics. “If the solution really is that we need to offer more competitive salaries, I think council needs to hear that because there’s no point listing a position if it’s just for show, like if there’s not a world where we’re going to be able to fill it at the salary that we’re offering,” La Spata said.
At the same time, CDPH is proposing to cut 124 vacant jobs next year. Before the hearing, more than 80 organizations sent a letter calling for $25 million to be added to CDPH’s budget so the department isn’t so reliant on grants. “Chicago has staggering health inequities, with an 11-year gap in life expectancy between Black and white Chicagoans,” the organizations wrote in a letter to Johnson and City Council members, among others.
“Coupled with racial and class health inequities across virtually every disease, the reality of vast health inequities means both untold suffering and thousands of early deaths annually. This is unacceptable and requires a stronger response.” The organizations, including the AIDS Foundation Chicago, and Health & Medicine Policy Research Group, argue that CDPH has been underfunded for a long time and didn’t have the capacity to “fully respond” when the pandemic hit in 2020.
COVID-19 won’t be the last public health emergency, the organizations wrote. They called for faster hiring, too. “The City must cut the red tape and get this fixed.
Lives depend on it,” the groups wrote. Creola Hampton, board chair of the Black Leadership Advocacy Coalition for Healthcare Equity, also urged the department to allocate $3 million annually to Black-led organizations — noting that Black residents comprise a majority of HIV infections. “Racism is a public health issue,” Hampton said on Thursday.
“Funding equity is the mandate.” Ige said she understands the call for more money. People don’t always value prevention until something bad happens, she told WBEZ.
She said she’s worried about politics being even more infused in public health and science with Trump in office. This gained steam during his first term when the pandemic hit and Trump downplayed the severity of the virus. For now, Ige is planning how to take care of the city as its chief doctor.
CDPH’s goals for next year include tackling the main reasons behind the racial life expectancy gap in Englewood, Garfield Park and North Lawndale, instead of taking this issue on across the entire city. People who live in these three neighborhoods have the shortest life spans in Chicago, public health data shows . These early deaths are largely driven by heart disease, homicides and opioid overdoses, Ige said.
The city plans to help residents by using programs they already have, like the home visiting program for newborns, to screen people and link them to community organizations. Alderpersons are holding weeks of budget hearings and must approve a final budget by Dec. 31.
Kristen Schorsch covers public health and Cook County for WBEZ. Tessa Weinberg and Mariah Woelfel cover city government for WBEZ..
