By Tom Sullivan, Editor, Government Health IT
Twitter: @GovHITEditor
The resurrected phrase in Washington on Tuesday is “orderly phase-down and suspension of operations.”
Midnight Monday arrived without any agreement between the House and Senate over the Continuing Resolution and as a result the federal government is officially shutdown. OMB director Sylvia Burwell circulated a memorandum to agency heads telling them to execute contingency plans.
“HHS expects to complete initial shutdown activities within the first day,” according to its published plans. That means furloughing 52 percent, or some 40,000, employees.
The percentages will vary across agencies and offices, HHS explained, adding that units with “a substantial direct service component” like Indian Health Service (IHS) maintain most of their staff while employee-intensive and grant-making agencies, like AHRQ and SAMSHA, will be operating sans the majority of employees.
And the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (ONC) was hit particularly hard. Of the total 184 on-board staffers at ONC, only 4 will be retained and charged with handling that orderly phase-down and suspension of operations.
Indeed, the government shutdown means ONC will put on hold its Standards and Interoperability work, privacy and security policy activities, clinical quality measure development, as well as maintaining the Certified Health IT Product List. On Tuesday morning, outgoing national coordinator Farzad Mostahsari, MD, revealed on Twitter that the monthly HIT Policy meeting scheduled for Wednesday, October 2, is cancelled.
CMS, for its part, will keep driving “large portions of ACA activities, including coordination between Medicaid and the Marketplace,” as in the health insurance exchanges that open on Tuesday. Medicare will not be disrupted in the short-term and states will still receive Medicaid funding but CMS will be “unable to continue discretionary funding for health care fraud and abuse strike force teams resulting in the cessation of their operations.”
Also functioning at reduced capacities, the National Institutes for Health (NIH) will continue caring for current patients but not admit new patients or initiate new protocols and it will reduce some veterinary services, while the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) will function at a minimal capacity to respond to outbreak investigations and operate its emergency centers, but it will be unable to run its annual influenza program, or support state and local health departments for biosurveillance.
“We urge Congress to act quickly to pass a Continuing Resolution to provide a short-term bridge that ensures sufficient time to pass a budget for the remainder of the fiscal year,” OMD director Burwell wrote in the memo, “and to restore the operation of critical public programs that will be impacted by a lapse in appropriations.”
This article was originally published on Government Health IT and is republished here with permission.