Alzheimer's Association Summit Aligns 43 Health Departments on Dementia Strategy, Flags Federal Funding as Key Constraint

A peer-reviewed report on the second Healthy Brain Initiative Summit for Public Health Action describes state and local officials from 43 jurisdictions converging on shared dementia priorities, while naming continued federal funding as essential to keeping the effort moving.

Public health leaders from 43 state and local health departments met on June 11 and 12 for the second Healthy Brain Initiative (HBI) Summit for Public Health Action, convened by the Alzheimer's Association, according to a report published in Alzheimer's & Dementia, the peer-reviewed journal of the Alzheimer's Association. Among the priority areas the group identified for the next phase of a national dementia strategy, the report lists "sustained federal investment" as essential, stating that continued funding for brain health, dementia and caregiving programs is critical to maintaining momentum and expanding impact nationwide. Joanne Pike, DrPH, the Association's president and chief executive, is quoted in the report saying the gathering was "a moment to turn strategy into sustained action."

The 43 jurisdictions represented are not an arbitrary count. They correspond to the second cohort of awards under the CDC's Building Our Largest Dementia (BOLD) Infrastructure for Alzheimer's Act program, which expanded from 23 state, local and tribal health departments in its first round to 43 after a 2023 increase in congressional appropriations, according to a companion account of the program's 20-year history published in the journal The Gerontologist. That program, created by a 2018 law and reauthorized by Congress through 2029, funds the same public health infrastructure that sent representatives to the summit: five-year awards meant to help health departments build dementia risk-reduction, early-detection and caregiving capacity.

The funding picture is more complicated than a bipartisan reauthorization vote suggests. The Gerontologist account, published in December 2025, describes what it calls "enormous uncertainty around the sustainability of awardee activities and federal leadership" despite the reauthorization, pointing to a 2025 reduction in CDC staff supporting the HBI and BOLD programs and noting that current awards have been extended one year at a time rather than being renewed on a multi-year basis. The article states there is "no indication how, or even whether" the awards will be re-competed to continue activities beyond 2026, meaning the very structure that connects the 43 health departments to federal support has a shelf life the summit's own attendees cannot yet see past.

The Alzheimer's & Dementia report says the summit also marked a step toward the next edition of the HBI Road Map series, the framework health departments use to plan dementia-related public health work, expected in fall 2027. Whether that timeline holds, and whether the underlying awards are renewed before their current extensions run out, depends on decisions inside CDC and Congress that neither article resolves.

For now, the record shows alignment among 43 health departments on priorities, and an acknowledged gap between that alignment and any guarantee of the federal money needed to act on it.