Public Health Programs Monitor (PHPM)

Federally supported health programs that directly affect individual and community health and wellbeing have experienced substantial funding and programmatic changes. With a fast-moving policy environment, decisionmakers lack information to understand where health-promoting efforts stand (e.g. at-risk of elimination, being reorganized or consolidated). The Public Health Programs Monitor (PHPM) tracks federal health-promoting programmatic and operational activities to offer insights into how federal decisions shape programs and community health. The initiative includes an interactive dashboard that documents proposed or actual funding reductions to federal health-promoting programs. The initiative also provides analysis and narratives that help explain trends that data alone cannot show, including how programs operate amid funding and staffing changes.

This first iteration of the PHPM identifies and summarizes programs within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) vulnerable to structural and funding changes as shown by draft and final budgetary documents, including the Fiscal Year (FY) 2026 and 2027 President’s Budget Request. The dashboard describes the program’s role in public health and the communities and populations they serve and provides updates on proposed and actual funding changes as documented by Congressional proposals and final budget allocations. Importantly, this initiative includes HHS programs outside of what has traditionally been considered public health and also have an impact on the public’s health. This work will be updated as new information becomes available, with opportunities for public input and feedback.

What content is currently included in this initiative?

The PHPM initiative includes: (1) a dashboard documenting public health infrastructure changes and (2) analysis that helps put the dashboard information in context.

Dashboard

This tool contains information about:

• Budget Lines: Indicates which budget line is associated with the program as indicated in the Agency’s Congressional Justifications.
• Grantee organization level: Indicates organization types that have received funding from these programs, if applicable.
• Reorganizations: Indicates whether a program was proposed to be reorganized to a newly proposed area of HHS.
• Consolidations: Indicates whether an existing program is proposed to be consolidated or merged to form entirely new program with new, and often leaner, budgets
• Eliminations: Indicates whether a program has been proposed to be entirely eliminated from an agency since 2025.
• Budget and Funding: Where available, proposed and final budgetary information from FY25 to the present.
• Website activity: Most recent updates and status of program agency webpages.

Written Analysis:

The dashboard does not currently contain information about all policy challenges facing health-promoting programs, such as executive orders, legislation, community impact, and workforce changes.  As this initiative progresses, we will offer analysis to contextualize content from the dashboard.

Readers may identify gaps in the dashboard and accompanying analyses (e.g. workforce changes, programs missing from an agency, etc.). TFAH recognizes these limitations and is committed to expanding and refining this work when publicly available information is made available. The initiative aims to provide a more comprehensive view over time that incorporates additional programmatic, policy, and operational activities across HHS and other federal agencies.

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