Is the US prepared to deal with another pandemic or widespread health crisis?

Based on current assessments, the US faces significant and growing concerns about its pandemic preparedness, with a mix of improving tools but weakening institutional capacity. Here's a breakdown:

Signs of Weakening Preparedness

Federal funding cuts are substantial. The Trump administration's proposed FY2026 budget would cut CDC funding by roughly half. CDC's budget would be reduced by 53 percent if the administration's proposed FY 2026 budget is adopted. Within that broader reduction, CDC's Public Health Emergency Preparedness program – the primary source of federal funding for state and local emergency preparedness – faces a 52 percent funding reduction.

Many programs are being eliminated entirely. Over 100 public health programs and funding lines would be eliminated under the President's proposed FY 2026 budget, including 61 programs at CDC and 40 programs at the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration.

Leadership vacuum at the top. The White House's own pandemic response office has been hollowed out — in 2025, Gerald Parker resigned as head of the office, leaving the office with no employees.

Already-appropriated funds are being clawed back. TFAH is deeply alarmed at the most recent cancellation of hundreds of millions of dollars in CDC grants to states and communities, which support core public health infrastructure including early detection of outbreaks and modernizing outdated data systems.

This comes at a bad time. According to Trust for America's Health's 2026 "Ready or Not" report, in 2025, the country faced the most severe flu season in nearly a decade, rising measles outbreaks, continued H5N1 avian influenza activity, and a growing number of extreme weather events—all while the federal systems built over decades to help states prepare for and respond to emergencies came under significant strain.

State-Level Disparities

Preparedness varies widely by state. The TFAH report places states and the District of Columbia into three performance tiers: 20 states in the high-performance tier, 17 states and the District of Columbia in the middle-performance tier, and 13 states in the low-performance tier. The report specifically includes a special feature examining how federal workforce reductions and funding instability could weaken preparedness nationwide.

Some Bright Spots in Technology

Not everything is bleak — scientific tools are advancing. At a recent Global Virus Network meeting, experts noted that the tools to confront future pandemics, including advanced surveillance, artificial intelligence, new antiviral therapies and next-generation vaccines, are improving rapidly, though the systems needed to use those tools consistently and effectively are still catching up. There's also a shift toward prediction: a move from reacting to pandemics to predicting them, using AI to analyze vast amounts of global genomic data, identifying patterns that could signal how viruses are likely to evolve before dangerous variants emerge.

Global Context

The US isn't alone in slipping readiness. A global report on the "100 Days Mission" — the goal of being able to respond to a pandemic within 100 days — found that the 100-day target is not yet achievable in many areas, with significant gaps persisting across diagnostics, therapeutics, vaccines and the systems required to deliver them rapidly and equitably. Globally, overall investment in pandemic countermeasure R&D continued to decline through FY2024, with the steepest impacts seen in therapeutics.

Bottom Line

The overall trajectory is concerning: as one 2026 analysis put it, the United States has weakened its public health infrastructure even as the likelihood of a new pandemic is high. While technological capabilities (AI-driven surveillance, faster vaccine platforms) continue to improve, the institutional backbone — funding, staffing, coordination, and leadership — that would actually deploy these tools during a crisis has been significantly destabilized in 2025–2026. This suggests the US is less prepared now than it was even a few years ago, despite having more advanced scientific capabilities on paper.