Local leaders in Pima County say they’re still monitoring how a series of Trump administration actions slashing federal funding and workforces will affect the local budget.
County staff has been tasked with compiling bi-weekly updates about the state of federal funding set aside or already spent for projects across 20 different county departments.
Sarah Davis, with the Pima County Administrator’s Office, told supervisors about a third of the county’s federally approved grant expenditures in fiscal year 2024 came from recurring grants or county money through the state.
“Some examples of those include our immunization dollars, our WIC dollars — that’s Women, Infant Children — maternal child health dollars, our WIOA money, our CPBG funding. So, block grants that affect health, human services, workforce, housing, those are some critical, critical services that the county does provide to this community,” she said.
She said that’s a total of roughly $52 million. The rest of the county’s federal funding share, about $105 million, comes from laws already passed by Congress and agencies like FEMA. But, Davis said, none of those funding streams or reimbursements are guaranteed.
That includes FEMA’s Shelter and Services Program, which has helped reimburse local jurisdictions like Pima County for efforts to assist migrants and asylum seekers released into the U.S. to pursue immigration cases. Davis said the last reimbursement payment the county received was for $3 million. But the program is frozen now, and they haven’t yet received the remaining $10 million.
Davis said initial estimates showed almost 64,000 federal workers in Arizona were fired in DOGE actions that began in February, including about 12,000 in Pima County. And they expect to see further impacts as more data becomes available.
“Because it’s not just federal workers, it’s contracted workers, it’s grant-funded, it’s academic institutions,” she said.
Davis said the true impact of firings is still unknown, especially after a federal judge ordered the re-hiring of thousands of probationary federal workers this month.
