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

Based on current assessments, there are significant concerns among public health experts that the United States is not well-prepared for another pandemic, with several structural and funding issues having emerged since the COVID-19 pandemic.

Signs of Weakened Preparedness

Federal budget and staffing cuts: Reports indicate substantial reductions to the agencies responsible for pandemic response. The President's proposed FY 2026 budget for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) amounts to a 53 percent reduction in funding as compared to FY 2024. More specifically for emergency readiness, 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. Other analyses similarly found the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) would see a 44% budget reduction, impacting disease prevention and emergency preparedness.

Program eliminations: Beyond funding cuts, over 100 public health programs and funding lines would be eliminated under the President's proposed FY 2026 budget, including 61 programs at CDC. The budget proposal specifically targets preparedness infrastructure, eliminating... Public Health Preparedness and Response, which can be conducted more effectively by States according to budget documents.

Economic ripple effects: Independent analysis estimates these cuts would cause public health grants to state and local governments and organizations to fall by $2.0 billion, compared to 2024, with state economies losing $5.4 billion in their gross domestic products.

Leadership vacuum: The federal coordination structure created after COVID has also been hollowed out — in 2025, Gerald Parker resigned as head of the White House Office of Pandemic Preparedness and Response Policy, leaving the office with no employees.

International cooperation withdrawal: the withdrawal of the USA from WHO has accelerated a turn towards nationalism and bilateral approaches to pandemic preparedness, adding another layer to an already complex architecture.

State-Level Variation

A comprehensive 2026 assessment from Trust for America's Health found uneven readiness across the country. The report evaluates the nation's readiness for public health emergencies through 10 indicators of state preparedness, placing states 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 notes this comes against a backdrop where 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.

The same report explicitly warns that wide variation in states' readiness for disease outbreaks, natural disasters, and other health emergencies... federal disruption could weaken emergency readiness nationwide.

Global Context

It's not just a US-specific problem — global pandemic readiness also appears to be stalling. An international assessment 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, and overall investment in pandemic countermeasure R&D continued to decline through FY2024, with the steepest impacts seen in therapeutics.

Bottom Line

The weight of current evidence from public health policy organizations, budget analyses, and preparedness scorecards suggests the US has moved in the direction of reduced capacity since the peak of COVID-era investment — through agency budget cuts, staff attrition, elimination of preparedness-specific programs, and withdrawal from international coordination bodies — rather than toward strengthened readiness. State-level preparedness also varies significantly, meaning the quality of response to a future health crisis could depend heavily on where in the country it occurs.