A portal that handles Medicaid and other federal health department funds is experiencing an outage, causing a wave of fear across social media as organizations scramble for information and others tie the outage to an impending freeze on federal government grants and loans.
News 6 is working to find out what is going on and how that may affect people.
Recommended Videos
The White House acknowledged Tuesday afternoon that there was a “Medicaid website portal outage.”
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt posted the following on X.com:
“The White House is aware of the Medicaid website portal outage. We have confirmed no payments have been affected — they are still being processed and sent. We expect the portal will be back online shortly.”
News 6 reached out to the White House to ask how long the portal will be down and what caused the outage, and were referred back to Leavitt’s post.
CBS News reported that the website is the Payment Management Services web portal, which the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services manages.
Organizations that get grants from HHS access this portal, as do state Medicaid programs, which is causing concern for Medicaid recipients across the country.
However, Leavitt told reporters Tuesday that anyone expecting direct federal funding will not be affected, including any individual assistance.
News 6 reached out to HHS with the same questions about the portal and the outage and we’re waiting to hear back. We also reached out to the Florida Department of Children and Families for more information and we’re waiting to hear back.
Other agencies reportedly locked out are Head Start early childhood programs and community health centers.
On the main page of the Payment Management Services website, before logging into the portal, is a series of notices.
One says the PMS will only be available from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. EST Monday through Friday.
The other notice says, “Due to Executive Orders regarding potentially unallowable grant payments, PMS is taking additional measures to process payments. Reviews of applicable programs and payments will result in delays and/or rejections of payments.”
The second notice may have more to do with the federal grants and loans freeze that was supposed to go into effect Tuesday evening.
The order put billions of dollars in federal funding on a temporary pause while the agencies review all of the funding to weed out anything that may run counter to the Trump administration’s agenda, specifically anything that may fall under diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, environmentally friendly initiatives, or initiatives that the White House feels would benefit the transgender community.
While individual assistance, such as Social Security, Medicare, food stamps and student loans were not supposed to be affected, thousands of local organizations across the country spent the day scrambling to see if they would be affected.
A federal judge temporarily blocked the federal grant freeze Tuesday evening.
Get today’s headlines in minutes with Your Florida Daily: