Investigations
City Has $142M Left in Federal COVID-19 Relief Funds After $87M Cuts to Balance 2025 Budget
(Michael Izquierdo / WTTW News)
Chicago has two years to spend $142 million in federal relief funds officials have promised to use to strengthen the city’s tattered social safety net and provide direct aid to Chicagoans struggling to recover from the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a WTTW News analysis.
City officials would have an additional $87 million to spend on a host of programs — including affordable housing, mental health, violence prevention, youth job programs and help for unhoused Chicagoans — but the Chicago City Council used those funds to balance the city’s 2025 budget and avert a property tax hike.
That means the City Council reduced the amount of federal money available to the city to fuel a wide variety of social service programs until the end of 2026 by nearly 38% to balance the city’s budget without a single sentence of debate about what those cuts will mean for Chicagoans who have yet to regain the ground they started to lose five years ago.
In all, Chicago has spent $310.4 million on the plan former Mayor Lori Lightfoot dubbed the “Chicago Recovery Plan” before Mayor Brandon Johnson rebranded it as his office’s “Road to Recovery” initiative, according to the most recent reports filed with the U.S. Department of the Treasury, which are required by federal law.
That effort is divided into 10 major categories: arts & culture; assistance to families; health & wellness; community development; environmental justice; homelessness; small business & workforce; tourism; violence prevention; and youth opportunities.
Only two areas did not see their budgets cuts: arts & culture and tourism. Nearly 96% of the funds set aside to help Chicago’s arts community had been spent by the end of 2024, giving officials little left to cut, records show.
Youth opportunities was the only category to see its budget rise slightly, adding $546,000, records show. Johnson has repeatedly vowed to expand the number of city-funded jobs as a way to prevent crime and violence.
The biggest cut was made to the assistance to families category, which lost $32.7 million, records show. The vast majority of those funds had been earmarked to restart the effort that sent $500 per month to Chicagoans living below the federal poverty line as part of a basic income program, records show.
An analysis of the first round of funding showed those who participated in the program paid down debt, spent more time with their families and got better jobs.
Efforts to help small businesses in Chicago take root were also slashed, with $28.8 million cut from a program designed to give entrepreneurs access to technology, training and support, records show.
An additional $11.7 million was cut from seven violence prevention program efforts, records show, despite widespread agreement that the efforts are working to reduce pervasive violence on the West and South sides. Johnson has also touted violence prevention programs as the heart of his effort to transform the Chicago Police Department by reducing the burden on officers.
Chicago’s entire budget for the federally funded programs is approximately $452.3 million, records show. That's less than what the city's Road to Recovery dashboard shows.
The city spent an additional $1.3 billion in federal COVID-19 relief funds to shore up Chicago’s pandemic-devastated budgets from 2021 through 2024, according to the Treasury Department reports.
WTTW News’ analysis is the first to examine three years’ worth of reports from city leaders to federal officials documenting how Chicago has spent the city’s $1.9 billion share of the federal relief package known as the American Rescue Plan Act, or ARPA.
Those records show city officials have struggled to make good on promises to use the influx of cash from the federal government to repair the damage caused by the pandemic, which has killed more than 8,300 Chicagoans, hospitalized another 57,000 and upended the lives of millions across the U.S.
City officials met the Dec. 31 deadline to budget the city’s entire share of the COVID-19 relief funds, records show.
Contact Heather Cherone: @HeatherCherone| (773) 569-1863 | [email protected]
