This story was reported and written by VPM News.
Dr. Norman Oliver led the Virginia Department of Health through the COVID-19 pandemic as state health commissioner. Now, he’s warning that the U.S. Health and Human Services Department’s decision to cut up to $425 million in federal funding for COVID-related grants makes Virginians more susceptible to future pandemics and “horrific consequences.”
Oliver says the cuts will interrupt efforts to upgrade state data collection systems, increase the likelihood of infectious disease spread, and decrease public health efforts to address the opioid epidemic and sexually transmitted diseases.
Earlier this week, President Donald Trump’s administration notified public health officials across the country about its decision to eliminate $11.4 billion in federal funding for COVID-related programs.
VDH department leaders have spent this week trying to grapple with the federal government’s abrupt decision to withdraw funds that had been allotted to the commonwealth at least through June 2026. They sent notifications to impacted employees, contract staff and contractors Tuesday, and have been trying to develop plans to ensure the state’s public health work continues with minimal interruptions.
“The COVID-19 pandemic is over, and HHS will no longer waste billions of taxpayer dollars responding to a non-existent pandemic that Americans moved on from years ago,” Andrew Nixon, HHS communications director, said in a statement published by NBC News.
As VPM News has reported, the “COVID-related” federal funding actually began in July 2019 and was meant to support the state’s public health response to various health care crises. That funding, awarded by the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention, eventually became part of Virginia’s efforts to combat the novel coronavirus.
Oliver, who was tapped by Democratic Gov. Ralph Northam to head the state’s public health agency in 2018 and served in that position until 2022, disputes the federal spending has been a waste, saying the funding was helping the commonwealth prepare for its next health crises.
The VDH budget more than doubled at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic — largely due to federal spending, according to JLARC, the General Assembly’s nonpartisan research agency.
A 2024 report showed federal funding for VDH expanded from roughly $250 million in fiscal year 2020 to $1.1 billion in fiscal year 2023. In 2024, even as some of the federal COVID funding expired, federal dollars accounted for nearly half of the department’s $1.29 billion budget. (State fiscal years run from July 1 to June 30; federal fiscal years run from Oct. 1 to Sept. 30.)
“The money was allocated during the pandemic, but the money was allocated to build the public health infrastructure to fight not just COVID, but future threats to public health,” Oliver told VPM News in an interview. “We will, in fact, experience future pandemics, and the lesson we should learn from COVID-19 is that we need to be better prepared.”
While the official public health emergency — and emergency funding — for the pandemic ended nationwide in spring 2023, Oliver said the pandemic highlighted persistent weaknesses in Virginia’s public health system. One area in need of updating was the public health data system, which Oliver described as “antiquated.”
Virginia, along with other state health systems, is in the midst of a multibillion-dollar effort to modernize internal systems. Those systems would better prepare health departments to track outbreaks of measles, the flu or other infectious diseases, according to Oliver. He added that efforts to update the state’s technology for tracking health data will be impeded by this week’s federal cuts.
“If you want to talk about waste, that’s a real waste to have spent several years working towards something, building something, and then have a rug pulled out from under you in the midst of that work,” Oliver said.
The funding being used for those upgrades was part of a grant directed for the state’s epidemiology labs, which Oliver said would be the largest of the cuts. Other grants the federal government terminated for Virginia were funding vaccination efforts among children and public health education work in poor and underserved communities, according to an internal VDH email shared with VPM News by someone who was not authorized to speak on the record.
During the pandemic in Virginia, child vaccination rates declined, while sexually transmitted diseases such as syphilis spread and opioid use increased. Some of that public health work fell to community health workers, which were specially funded during the public health emergency.
“Getting out [and] talking to communities about ways to prevent this is really critical work, and important for the health of the community,” Oliver said. “It’s really going to hurt the areas where these problems are the biggest.”
He pointed to urban areas, Southwest Virginia and Appalachia as places that will most likely feel the largest impact.The canceled grants were set to expire in the next year or so. Oliver conceded that grants are always time-limited, but said agency leaders usually have time to prepare for the loss of funds and apply for additional grants to allow the work to continue. “Abrupt loss of grant funding is something that you aren’t planning for,” he said. “It’s a huge blow to our public health infrastructure.”
“We’re going to see horrific consequences that are unforeseen by these folks,” Oliver warned. “Those of us in public health are here to tell them that the consequences of this are going to be the loss of life.”
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