HHS facing billion-dollar backlog of delayed grants after DOGE

The Department of Health and Human Services has asked some laid-off staff if they could return to work temporarily, as the department grapples with a backlog of grants that has swelled to more than a billion dollars in the wake of hurdles set up by DOGE.

Multiple HHS officials, who were not authorized to speak to the press, said the laid-off staff asked to return to work include a handful of employees who managed grants in the department's Administration for Children and Families, or ACF. Around half of ACF's grants management staff have been laid off or left under the Trump administration, one official said.

Delayed grants at ACF include money for residential services for unaccompanied migrant children, the National Indigenous Domestic Violence Hotline and youth homelessness.