Central Michigan University’s wastewater research program has been cut as a part of the United States Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) effort to pull back $11.4 billion in federal grants, according to a university spokesperson.
CMU Professor of Microbiology Michael Conway and his team received this grant of $1,143,496 for the COVID-19 wastewater monitoring for 2025-26 fiscal year. They had been able to spend $175,778 of it, the spokesperson wrote in an email.
Previously, Conway's research received about $3 million in federal grants from 2020 till 2024 that the team was able to use for their research, Conway said.
Conway said he is actively pursuing other federal grants and declined to comment further.
Elizabeth Alm, also a professor of microbiology at CMU, worked alongside Conway, two other faculty members and at least 10 students on this research project. She said it was a statewide effort to sample wastewater for monitoring diseases like COVID-19, influenza, RSV and norovirus.
“It's always better in terms of public health and in terms of being cost effective to try to head off an outbreak of an illness rather than to have to treat it once the outbreak is full blown,” Alm said.
A unique thing about this Michigan-wide research was that it was looking at samples from suburban and rural communities, because places like that usually don’t get covered in research monitoring, Alm said.
“I feel like the citizens of Michigan have lost a really valuable resource,” she said.
Alm found out that her research was cut on April 1, when CMU received the immediate stop work order.
“It was hard to believe,” Alm said. “It seems to be so short sighted because we had a really unique network setup in Michigan that was providing valuable data.
“I just feel terrible that we've lost this. I'm worried for public health infrastructure in Michigan and throughout the country, and I'm worried about a loss of expertise in so many areas in public health.”
An HHS spokesperson wrote in an email to WCMU that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) hopes to save money through these grant cuts.
“The COVID-19 pandemic is over, and HHS will no longer waste billions of taxpayer dollars responding to a non-existent pandemic that Americans moved on from years ago,” the spokesperson wrote.
They also wrote that since now on the department will be prioritizing projects that align with U.S. President Donald Trump’s battle of the chronic disease epidemic.
At the same time, the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services said in a statement to WCMU that the state is part of a lawsuit against HHS for canceling these grants.
The coalition of states received a preliminary injunction to prevent the HHS from taking away the grant money, according to a press release on May 16.
“Wastewater surveillance is crucial to identifying COVID-19 and other virus infections and community transmission early on, including in populations that are not showing signs of illness or may not be seeking health care,” Michigan HHS wrote in an email. “We will continue to fight to provide important services that protect the health and safety of Michigan families.”
HHS has until June 20 to report how they comply with the injunction, the press release read.
It is not known what this litigation would mean for CMU and whether the researchers would be able to get their grant back, according to an email from the Office of Research and Graduate Studies.
Editor's note: We note WCMU's broadcast license is held by Central Michigan University. WCMU's newsroom is editorially independent from WCMU, and the university is not involved in writing, editing or reviewing our reports.
