Public health organizations are calling for Congress to fund the CDC’s wastewater surveillance program — which tracks COVID-19 and other diseases — in its 2027 budget, while state health departments plan ahead for potential gaps in grants.
Key points you should know:
- The CDC’s National Wastewater Surveillance System, a federal program that supports testing across the U.S. for COVID-19 and other diseases, is set to run out of funding this fall.
- Testing is carried out mostly by state health departments, some of which have planned ahead to continue surveillance into 2027. Still, new funding is needed to make the program more permanent.
- A contract between the CDC and health tech company Verily to test sewage at some sites is set to conclude in August. The CDC intends to extend the contract to September and start a new one after that.
- Science and health organizations are lobbying Congress to fund NWSS in the CDC’s fiscal year 2027 budget. The request has been acknowledged but more pressure is needed to get it into the final budget.
Wastewater surveillance in the U.S. for COVID-19 and other infectious diseases may be curtailed starting this fall unless the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) receives more funding for its program.
The CDC’s National Wastewater Surveillance System (NWSS), the federal program that supports testing in hundreds of sewer systems across the country, is running out of the funds that Congress allocated to it back in 2021.
Along with funding wastewater testing, NWSS is a central resource for compiling and presenting data from this surveillance, which approximates disease levels in the cities and counties where those sewer systems are based. Many people rely on this information to know how much SARS-CoV-2 and other viruses are spreading in their communities, as individual testing through medical centers has become much less accessible than it was early in the pandemic.
To keep NWSS going, science and health organizations are pushing for Congress to provide dedicated funding for the program in the CDC’s annual budget, starting with fiscal year 2027, which begins on October 1, 2026. The House of Representatives’ appropriations subcommittee that determines federal health agencies’ budgets has recognized this request, but more pressure is needed to get this in the final budget, policy experts say.
In the last year, NWSS has “been getting a patchwork of funding, but there is no dedicated funding line for wastewater surveillance,” said Amalia Corby, director of federal affairs at the American Society of Microbiology (ASM), which coordinated a letter to representatives and senators calling for NWSS to receive at least $120 million in the CDC’s 2027 budget. “In order to keep this system going and stable, we do need there to be consistent funding.”
Despite headlines about “maps going dark,” testing is not going to immediately stop across the country if funding is not allocated by October. Much of NWSS’s funding was funneled from the CDC to state health departments, which have been planning ahead for potential budget shortfalls. Several representatives from state agencies and scientists who work with them told The Sick Times that they are set to continue testing after fall 2026.
A more immediate loss could be the more than 100 sites tested by the health company Verily. Since fall 2023, Verily has had a contract with the CDC to directly manage wastewater testing for some sites where state health departments have less robust programs of their own, in order to make the federal agency’s data more comprehensive. This contract is slated to end in August, according to its record on a U.S. government site.
In response to questions about its contract with Verily, a representative from the CDC said that the agency intends to extent the contract to September 14. “This extension will provide CDC additional time to compete a new contract,” the spokesperson added.
Even with stopgap measures in some places, however, wastewater experts stressed that sewage surveillance should be a routine part of CDC’s budget going forward. This testing has proven itself not only for following widely spreading pathogens like COVID-19 and the flu, but also novel outbreaks like measles and mpox.
“Wastewater surveillance is one of the best ways — regardless of what your political stance is — to spend tax dollars, because it’s cheap for what you get, and super informative,” said Rachel Poretsky, a microbiologist at the University of Illinois Chicago who works on surveillance for both the city and state.
Wastewater testing is “unprecedented” in the level of information it can provide about infectious disease spread, said Marc Johnson, a virologist and wastewater detective at the University of Missouri. “If wastewater surveillance goes away, that knowledge goes away.”
Wastewater testing is “unprecedented” in the level of information it can provide about infectious disease spread. “If wastewater surveillance goes away, that knowledge goes away.”
Marc Johnson, University of Missouri
From emergency COVID-19 response to wide-reaching surveillance
As the novel coronavirus spread around the world in early 2020, scientists quickly realized they could track COVID-19 through sewage. The science predates the pandemic; researchers previously had tracked polio, microbes, and other substances.
But tracking SARS-CoV-2, initially labeled as a respiratory virus, opened up new avenues as researchers learned how much health information travels through public sewer systems. Early academic projects following the coronavirus at a single sewershed expanded to larger efforts spanning many sites and diseases.
In 2021, Congress charged the CDC to grow and standardize these burgeoning efforts. The American Rescue Plan, a massive piece of COVID-19 relief legislation, included funding for wastewater surveillance.
The agency planned for this initial COVID-related funding to last for five years, concluding in 2025, NWSS director Amy Kirby said back in spring 2023. Since launching the network, the CDC has expanded it from COVID-19 to include routine tracking for the seasonal flu, avian flu strains, RSV, measles, and mpox. As of June 2026, NWSS includes about 1,300 testing sites representing about 144 million Americans.
To Johnson in Missouri, one of the most promising aspects of the surveillance is genetic variant tracking. For example, when the lineage BA.3.2 (also called Cicada) appeared in the U.S. late last year, “by the time they found the first patient sample, we had already found it in like 20 states” in wastewater, he said. Johnson coauthored a paper in a CDC journal detailing how scientists used sewage surveillance and a program testing international travelers to identify where this variant was spreading.
Scientists are also using wastewater to track measles, which has exploded in the U.S. in the last year. Poretsky and her colleagues “were able to tie a signal in wastewater to a single patient that had measles” when their routine testing in Cook County, Illinois identified a measles virus sequence, she said.
And when polio resurfaced in New York State in 2022, researchers used wastewater surveillance to understand the scale of the outbreak. “Polio doesn’t cause clinical disease in the majority of people,” making it difficult to identify how many have actually been infected, said David Larsen, an epidemiologist at Syracuse University who works with the state health department on surveillance. “We wouldn’t have known how far it had spread without wastewater,” Larsen said.
We wouldn’t have known how far [polio] had spread without wastewater.
David Larsen, Syracuse University
State health departments and scientists prepare for funding gaps
The CDC NWSS has supported wastewater testing in two main ways: first, by providing grants to state health departments to build up their own testing networks, and second, by paying for testing directly through contracts with private health tech companies.
With the focus on grants to state agencies, wastewater surveillance operates similarly to other health surveillance systems in the U.S. in which states collect most of the data, then report it to the CDC. Some state agencies directly process samples from wastewater treatment plants and analyze data, while others collaborate with academic researchers on these tasks.
In Massachusetts, for example, the state public health laboratory “has been investing resources to bring wastewater testing in-house,” wrote a representative of the state’s health department in a statement. They noted that the CDC’s grants have specifically “encouraged health departments to develop their own in-house capacity” for this newer type of surveillance.
In this decentralized system, state agencies can make their own decisions about how to best run surveillance programs. But it’s led to major discrepancies in testing, as some states have been much more interested in building up these programs than others. California has 80 testing sites reporting to the CDC as of June 25, while states like Louisiana and Mississippi have fewer than five.
If NWSS doesn’t receive more funding in the CDC’s next budget, the impacts would similarly “vary by state,” Larsen said. Some state agencies have already planned ahead, assuming they might not receive a new wastewater testing grant, and are budgeting out prior grants to last well beyond fall 2026. Still, they will need more funding to make their programs permanent.
The Sick Times sent requests to fourteen state health departments with wastewater surveillance programs asking about their current budgets, and received responses from eight. These include:
- Colorado: Fully funded through July 2027, partially funded through July 2029 for higher-priority targets.
- Massachusetts: Funded through July 2027.
- North Carolina: Funded through 2027.
- Ohio: Funded through July 2029.
- Pennsylvania: May utilize other funding sources in 2027 to continue testing, if more CDC funding isn’t available.
- Minnesota: Has funding “for the next couple of years.”
- Utah: Funded through July 2027.
- Washington: Fully funded through July 2027; could continue after that with operational reductions.
Illinois and Missouri also plan to continue testing into next year, according to Poretsky and Johnson, respectively. In New York, Larsen said that the state’s program — which has been one of the most robust in the U.S. — may reduce its number of testing sites or sampling frequencies, not only because of uncertainty in future CDC funding but also to shift the program from an emergency COVID-19 response to a more routine, sustainable effort.
In response to questions about the source of their funding for wastewater surveillance, most state agencies said that it was entirely from CDC grants. Along with those grants to states, the CDC has directly paid for wastewater surveillance at over 100 sites through a contract with the health tech company Verily. This contract, as well as earlier iterations with other companies, aimed to supplement the NWSS network by adding testing sites that were outside state agencies’ capabilities.
This contract is currently set to end in August, but the CDC plans to extend it to September and start a new contract after that date, according to a spokesperson from the agency. Verily declined to respond to questions for this story.
Pushing for funding in the CDC’s 2027 budget
Some people with Long COVID and other chronic health conditions rely heavily on wastewater data to inform their daily COVID-19 precautions. “At the individual level, people who are seeking to reduce their risk of infection may choose to schedule medical appointments at times when there are lower local wastewater numbers,” wrote Alison Cohen, an epidemiologist at the University of California, San Francisco, in an email.
For those looking to advocate for this data collection to continue, policy experts recommended contacting representatives in the House and Senate and encouraging them to include funding for wastewater surveillance in the CDC’s fiscal year 2027 budget. An appropriations draft from the House’s subcommittee overseeing federal health agencies encourages the CDC to continue this work, but does not include a specific budget number.
In its letter to subcommittee leaders, ASM called for $120 million, as this funding is “the baseline” for NWSS to continue operating at a similar level, said Corby, from the scientific society.
Wastewater surveillance has bipartisan support in Congress and from different public health organizations, she said, as shown by the nearly 20 organizations that signed on to ASM’s letter. There are also two bills supporting NWSS: the PREDICT Act in the Senate and SEWER Act in the House. The SEWER Act includes a charge for NWSS to receive $150 million each year through 2030.
“The next step” for potential funding is to “push in the Senate,” Corby said; the Senate has its own appropriations process, and health programs can sometimes be contentious there. Both chambers will continue negotiating funding bills in the coming months, then go through reconciliation in October.
In addition, sharing feedback directly with scientists working on wastewater surveillance can be impactful, Poretsky said, as researchers may use that information in their own grant applications. “Just letting the people who are generating the data know that you’re using it goes a long way.”
Just letting the people who are generating the data know that you’re using it goes a long way.
Rachel Poretsky, University of Illinois Chicago
Betsy Ladyzhets is a co-founder and the managing editor of The Sick Times. She will continue covering NWSS, along with other federal government programs related to COVID-19 and Long COVID. Send her tips at betsy@thesicktimes.org or betsyladyzhets.25 on Signal.
Editor’s note, 1:30 p.m. ET, June 30: This story was updated shortly after publication with information from the CDC about the agency’s contract with Verily.
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