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Two weeks after hundreds of millions of dollars in funds was approved by Congress to fight the Zika virus, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) have outlined a plan to divide the fund on Tuesday.

According to NBC, the federal officials said that the Zika fund will not go anywhere until the beginning of the next year.HHS pushed back on questions about why the department wasn't ready to distribute the fund to combat the Zika virus as soon as Congress allocated the funding.

"There is a process for being able to spend money within the federal level with guidelines," said Kevin Griffis, the assistant secretary of public affairs at HHS on Tuesday. He further added that the department has shown "the seriousness with which we have approached this health challenge."

Caitlyn Miller, director of the division of discretionary programs, said that Congress did not award the full $1.9 billion the Obama administration had been asking for, and sometimes allocated it in specific ways. 

Miller said, "We had to make tradeoffs," to reporters in a telephone briefing.

According to the announcement made on Tuesday, $394 million will go to the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), $152 million to the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and $387 million towards the public health and social emergency fund.

Within the earmarked $387 million, $75 million will be used to reimburse health providers who treat uninsured Zika patients, $40 million will be used to expand Zika resources across US territories and $20 million will be used for regional and national projects such as creating microcephaly registries.

Stephen Redd, MD , director of the office of public health preparedness and response for the CDC said the supplemental funding will help build increase by $44.25 million the Public Health Emergency Preparedness(PHEP)fund.

According to the CDC, Florida,the only state with active transmissions of Zika virus, will receive $2.7 million in PHEP funds.

Sherri Berger,MSPH,the CDC's Chief operations officer said the organization is finalizing its spending plans for the supplemental funding, which will mainly go to Zika response efforts and microcephaly surveillance.