Myth of the Week: Wittman is good for rural Virginians
(...as long as they don't care about healthcare, voting, economic opportunity, or broadband)
Welcome to Myth of the Week, where we address some of the most-repeated myths about Rob Wittman’s work as our Congressional representative.
MYTH:
Wittman is good for rural Virginians.
REALITY:
We’ve already established that Virginia’s farmers aren’t better off with Wittman. All rural residents deserve a representative who has a deep understanding of their unique healthcare needs, voting challenges, and sub-optimal broadband service. Wittman hasn’t delivered.
Disastrous healthcare
Rural health disparities are a serious, ongoing problem that many have attempted to solve, but few have succeeded. Rural residents face lots of specific healthcare challenges, including:
Lengthy travel times for preventative and emergency care
Limited access to specialists
Maternal health deserts
Heavy dependence on Medicaid
Medicaid cuts from H. R. 1
Free clinics overwhelmed by influx of patients who lost Medicaid
The closure of three rural healthcare clinics
The threat of rural hospitals losing funding or closing
As the First District’s representative, you’d think Wittman would have jumped at the chance to resolve these problems during his 18 years in Congress. Instead, he has dropped the ball too many times to count.
In 2025, Wittman flip-flopped on healthcare coverage like it was going out of style. First, he signed a letter stating that protecting Medicaid was so important that he couldn’t “support a final [reconciliation] bill that threatens access to coverage or jeopardizes the stability of our hospitals and providers.” Then he turned around and voted for those exact cuts in H.R. 1, gutting $50.4 billion from rural hospitals.
When a $189 million healthcare grant band-aid came from the federal government to help offset Medicaid cuts, Wittman supported it — but the grant falls far short of the $1 billion needed for the state’s proposed “VA Rural Vitality” plan, which would have addressed rural healthcare access challenges across Virginia. Instead of making up the shortfall from the H. R. 1 cuts, the optimistically named “Rural Health Transformation Fund” has been called “a $50 billion plug for a $300 billion hole.”
Here’s some of what rural residents stand to lose because of underfunding:
Updates of outdated medical technology
Modernizing electronic health records
Reduction of provider shortages and travel time to treat chronic disease
Expansion of remote care options
Support for health technology startups
Funding for medical residencies at rural hospitals
More healthcare apprenticeships
Community college investments
Increased opportunities for high school students to enter healthcare professions
Telehealth and mobile health clinics
Wearable tech for management of chronic diseases
Nutrition and fitness initiatives
The fate of such programs now hangs by a thread. While rural residents want and deserve a robust healthcare system, Wittman makes them settle for crumbs while telling them they’re getting a three-course meal — and there are not nearly enough crumbs to go around. Instead of being a healthcare hero for rural Virginians, Congressman Wittman keeps choosing to be a zero.
The SAVE Act: an attempt to disenfranchise rural voters
Wittman voted to pass the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act (H. R. 7296). While we’re thankful that this bill failed to advance in the Senate, it’s worth examining what Wittman supported here. If passed, the SAVE Act would have introduced obstacles to American voting in two key ways: all Americans would have to 1) prove U.S. citizenship when registering to vote, and 2) show a specific form of ID when voting in person or by mail.
Even though elections are more secure than ever, and even though voter fraud is vanishingly rare, Wittman voted (the irony!) to punish his rural constituents by making voting less accessible, more strenuous, and more costly. He contributed to the potential disenfranchisement of over 30% of VA-01 (and to 60 million rural Americans in total).
The SAVE Act masqueraded as “election security” when in fact it was a solution in search of a problem. It was also a poll tax, because anyone who lacked the required documents would have had to pay fees to obtain them. For example, people who changed their names upon marrying would have to pay for copies of their birth certificates and marriage certificates to prove identity continuity. Or they’d need to pay for a passport (at a current cost of $165 for a new passport book). Either way, it’d be a burden in terms of time, money, and effort. It’s estimated that 21 million voters lack easy access to the documents that the SAVE Act would have demanded.
Here are some of the ways the SAVE Act would have harmed rural voters:
Loss of access to remote voting services
Loss of easy, secure access to their ballot box
Jeopardization of online voting services (further wasting taxpayer money)
An hours-long drive (possibly including interstate trips) to register to vote in person, or to update a registration in person
Absentee mail ballot voters would have to obtain and present photocopies of their ID
Hardship for disabled/senior voters
The SAVE Act was intended to deprive thousands of rural VA-01 voters of the accessible voter registration methods that they’ve been using for years, if not decades. It would have forced them to “pay to play” if they wanted to participate in elections. Inexcusable!
But Wittman didn’t hesitate to suppress their participation in the voting process and make them suffer while trying to fulfill their civic responsibility. By voting for the SAVE Act, he revealed his lack of conscience as well as his failure to uphold his constitutional oath to ensure his rural constituents could make their voices heard — even if they wanted to vote for him.
The rural broadband disconnect
Rural broadband has lagged behind its urban counterpart, but every American deserves the quality of life that a digital lifeline allows. As of 2021, “[o]ver a quarter of Virginia’s rural population doesn’t have access to broadband internet, and that has become a pressing issue for unserved communities, as vital services like healthcare and education increasingly depend upon high-speed internet connections.”
2023 data revealed that approximately “800,000 Virginia households still don’t have wireline broadband internet.” The broadband gap between rural and urban is stark because only 2.6% of urban areas lack coverage. The disparity is real, and causes real economic harm to rural Virginians.
Rural residents need broadband for all the activities we all do online: banking, entertainment, work (which might mean a “dairy farmer coordinating automatic milking machines”). In rural areas, good internet access is especially important for telehealth, remote work, and online education. Rural residents particularly need healthcare infrastructure like the Virginia Rural Health Association, through which “doctors, nurses and hospital administrators across the state are using… fiber networks to deliver specialized care to rural patients.” This type of “transformational healthcare delivery” requires terrestrial, fiber broadband for the most dependability and impact.
Broadband coverage for rural Virginia can be challenging because of low incomes, inaccurate coverage maps, and greedy railroad companies who “block critical infrastructure deployment” by charging enormous fees for running fiber alongside railroad tracks. Broadband relies on both state and federal funding, so disruptions to either can slow progress.
Virginia is a “nationwide leader in deploying broadband access,” but still has 133,000 addresses yet to be connected. And here’s the rub: the Trump administration wants to rely on satellite technology to provide internet access. Satellite internet is less reliable than fiber cables, but it would create yet more wealth for people like Trump-supporting billionaire Elon Musk and his Starlink company. Wittman seems happy to allow that consideration to override the broadband needs of rural Virginians.
Wittman talks a big game in his press releases about how “[h]igh speed broadband has the potential to revolutionize the way rural populations live their lives” — but how does his legislative action measure up, while he claims to have been working on this issue for 20 years? What do his rural constituents have to show for these alleged efforts? It’s not entirely clear what kind of legislative success he’s achieved for rural broadband, even though, after 20 years, it should be readily apparent. Rob “Do-The-Bare-Minimum” Wittman drafts broadband-related legislation, puts out misleading statements about his impact on the issue, claims to support closing the digital divide, discusses the ins and outs of broadband in articles and press releases, joined the bipartisan Congressional Rural Broadband Caucus, and has co-sponsored broadband legislation aimed at helping rural residents. That’s great. Where are the results? Wittman points his finger at “burdensome regulations” for the lack of progress on rural broadband access. His lack of measurable results suggests that either he doesn’t try hard enough to achieve real rural broadband gains, or he lacks the Congressional power he thinks he has — and probably both. When Wittman’s rural constituents need him to push for real progress on broadband, he poses for photo ops.
Virginia’s rural residents need reliable healthcare, accessible voting, and dependable broadband. Wittman has either actively voted to undermine those resources, or he has made token efforts that show little to no progress for all his years in office. His (in)actions do not convey a real commitment to his rural constituents. We ALL deserve better.
How can Congressman Rob Wittman do better by his rural constituents? Let us know what you think in the comments.