Morgan Griffith has represented Virginia's 9th District — Southwest Virginia — since 2011. Fifteen years is plenty of time to build a record. Here are 3 things his constituents should know about it.

He runs the House health subcommittee — and voted to put his own district's hospitals at risk

Griffith isn't just any vote on healthcare. He chairs the House Subcommittee on Health. If anyone in Congress should protect rural hospitals, it's him.

Instead, he voted for Trump's budget bill — and its Medicaid cuts left three hospitals in his own Southwest Virginia district flagged as at risk of closure: Dickenson Community Hospital, Buchanan County General Hospital, and Tazewell Community Hospital. When a rural hospital closes, the next emergency room can be an hour away.

The damage goes well beyond three hospitals. An estimated 260,000 Virginians are projected to lose Medicaid coverage, and Virginia stands to lose $26 billion in federal Medicaid funding over the next 14 years. It's already started: Augusta Health closed three clinics, naming the bill as the reason. The man in charge of health policy did this to his own patients.

He wants to make DOGE's cuts permanent

No state got hit harder by Elon Musk's DOGE than Virginia. The cuts wiped out 23,500 civilian federal jobs in the state — erasing six years of job growth in under eleven months. And for all that pain, DOGE never came close to delivering the savings it promised; its "efficiency" campaign came with heavy hidden costs that we'll be paying for years.

Griffith's response? He said he believes the House will codify DOGE's cuts — write them permanently into law. Not undo the damage. Lock it in.

He hasn't held a town hall in more than a decade

Griffith calls in-person town halls "inefficient" — and hasn't held one in over ten years. His predecessor, Rick Boucher, says he held 70 or more across the district.

His constituents haven't stopped asking. In 2025, protesters gathered in Bedford to demand a town hall. When Southwest Virginians finally organized their own "empty chair" town hall so their questions could at least be heard, Griffith did exactly what the name predicted: he didn't show up.

Think about what's on the list above — hospitals at risk, thousands of jobs gone. Those are exactly the questions he'd have to answer in a room full of his own voters. Now the empty chair makes sense.

Fifteen years is a pattern

A health chairman whose own hospitals are on the closure list, a cheerleader for making DOGE's damage permanent, and a decade-plus of refusing to face the people he works for. Different stories, same habit: Griffith answers to Washington, not to Southwest Virginia — and after 15 years, that's not a rough patch, it's the record. In 2026, the 9th District finally gets to grade it.