While these two public health emergencies may seem far from our shores, scroll through social media or follow one news cycle to the next and you will find growing concerns, questions and misinformation about both outbreaks. What we have heard in response has been too little and too late. And if the next health emergency is bigger and closer to home, that void and delay in the kind of public communication that keeps people informed, connected and safe will cost lives.
What should worry every civic leader, especially mayors, governors and tribal leaders, is that these two outbreaks reveal giant cracks in the once-world-class public health system, fissures that will only widen in this era of diminished federal leadership and attacks on credible science.
A September 2025 report from the Milken Institute School of Public Health at George Washington University concluded that proposed Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) budget cuts would endanger public health and undermine state and local economies, further eroding prevention efforts. While Congress largely rejected the proposed cuts, much of the damage had already been done through executive orders. Experts have raised alarms over the gutting of CDC funding and leadership, with many senior positions remaining vacant. We are seeing those warnings come true in real time right now.
As a result, what was once a significant federal responsibility now falls more heavily on state and local leaders. As someone who has prepared for and managed crises from the front lines, including in response to COVID-19, wildfire, hurricanes and beyond, I know how a leader can get pulled in every direction at once with competing priorities and different stakeholders, not to mention mounting pressures from an anxious public. There are important steps that a leader can take right now to be ready for when a health emergency reaches their doorstep:
• Restructure your chain of command. Particularly in smaller communities where funding is limited or staff wear multiple hats, start by identifying who your emergency manager will be before a crisis forces that question. The emergency manager should report directly to the chief executive, not through layers of bureaucracy that slow information and decision-making when hours matter. There is no defensible argument for keeping your emergency manager buried two reporting layers down. They help you make important decisions quickly, provide real-time assessment and command of risk, and help you do what you were elected to do: lead.
• Bring your emergency management and public health leadership together. Emergency managers are trained to operate in chaos and make real-time calls across hazards. Public health officials bring the experience, data and epidemiological grounding those decisions require. Together they are far more effective than when they operate in silos. Mayors and governors should convene joint briefings with both now, assess readiness and identify shortfalls in staffing, resources and external partnerships while there is still time to fix them.
• Be ready to fill the communication void with accurate, timely information. Officials need to be issuing clear, regular public health messaging through every available channel, including trusted community organizations and ethnic media. The public is paying attention. According to a 2025 Institute for Public Relations survey, 70 percent of Americans identify misinformation and disinformation as major problems. Do not wait for bad information to spread. Get in front of it early through the people, channels, platforms and news outlets communities already rely on.
• Require genuine community engagement. Not box-checking. Not a press release with an overwhelming amount of detail. Leadership starts at the top, which means civic leaders must champion bottom-up practices that put the real needs and circumstances of people at the center of how problems get solved. The communities most often left out of preparedness planning are the same ones hit hardest in a crisis: rural areas, older adults, low-income families, people with disabilities, immigrant communities and beyond. Make the extra effort before an emergency and you won’t need to make excuses after.
A fractured response system, poor information-sharing strategy and weak civic infrastructure are not acts of nature. They are choices. Let’s inoculate ourselves against them through effective risk communications and the kind of local leadership that earns public trust before a crisis demands it.
Justin Ángel Knighten is a communications expert and public affairs consultant. He’s a former crisis manager in California and a former associate administrator for the Federal Emergency Management Agency Office of External Affairs. He is a Sustainable Future Fellow at the George Washington University Alliance for a Sustainable Future and an advisory member of the Climate Risk Lab at the University of Washington Foster School of Business.
Governing's opinion columns reflect the views of their authors and not necessarily those of Governing's editors or management.
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