By Dave Ress

If she hadn’t been a CIA officer who filed her fact-findings in classified reports, Gov.-elect Abigail Spanberger says she might well have become a journalist.

Spanberger told the state’s main news media association Thursday that she joined the CIA because she “wanted to figure things out and understand what was happening in the world,” just as journalists do.

She promised the Virginia Press Association that she would run her administration in an open, transparent way.

“I look forward to making sure that you all are getting answers from me or from my administration about what it is that we’re working on, what it is that we’re doing, and how we are trying to do right by the Virginians that I will be serving as governor,” she told journalists at the Virginia Press Association’s annual Day in the Capital event, held this year at Maymont in Richmond.

“Here in the United States, the principle of recognizing the freedom of speech and the freedom of the press is extraordinarily important for progress, for holding people accountable, for bringing communities together, for informing people in times of emergency and in times of calm,” she said.

Spanberger said she expects that news reporters were hearing the same things she heard on the campaign trail: that Virginians are challenged by rising costs of energy, housing and health care.

All are priorities for her administration, she said.

Public schools are another focus, she said.

“As a parent of three school-age kids currently in Virginia public schools, this issue is personal to me,” she said.

Producing more energy

On policy to meet Virginia’s rising demand for electricity, an issue that a panel explored earlier at VPA Day, Spanberger said the state needs to generate more power.

“The challenge is not necessarily the type of energy that we’re producing. It’s the fact that we’re not producing or generating enough energy,” she said.

“It is going to be the generation of additional energy that will have an impact on costs,” she said.

Solar facilities are the fastest way to bring on more generating capacity, but the state will need a mix of ways to generate electricity in the future, she said.

While small modular nuclear reactors are one way that could boost generation without emitting the greenhouse gases driving climate change, “we’re still 10-plus years away from that,” Spanberger said. “There’s benefit to renewable energy in that it can be realized much, much faster,” she said.

Spanberger said she wants to amend the Virginia Clean Economy Act with measures to encourage energy storage facilities. 

“Having storage capacity will allow for us to mitigate some of the ebbs and flows that can create, in some cases, brownouts,” she said.

The clean economy act sets targets for utilities to add solar farms and wind turbines to their fleets and calls on Dominion Energy to shutter fossil-fuel plants by 2045, with Appalachian Power to follow suit by 2050.

Health care

Health care was the focus of another press association panel. Spanberger said the impact of President Donald Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill” was “absolutely catastrophic … and the state cannot mitigate every harm caused by that bill.”

She said one area where the state can ease impacts is on the federal requirement for six-month eligibility reviews to ensure that adult Medicaid recipients are working.

Spanberger said she would push to make sure those reviews are handled quickly and effectively so people don’t fall through the cracks and lose coverage.

In addition, she said she’d explore ways to help health care providers and hospitals find ways to deal with funding cuts, resulting from the Trump bill’s limits on state provider taxes, money that helps Virginia draw down federal Medicaid funds. Limits on provider taxes mean less ability to draw federal Medicaid money for the joint federal- and state-funded health insurance program.

“We might facilitate multistate compacts for support, particularly when it comes to specialists, where telehealth might be employed,” she said.

“But in terms of replacing those actual basic dollars that are fully out of the system, the state can’t make up that difference,” she said.

Another way Washington is hitting health care is new limits on borrowing for graduate school, including medical school.

“I’m thinking, from the state’s response,” Spanberger said, “are there different things that we could do with loan repayment programs, trying to keep physicians here in Virginia, trying to help support their ability to go to medical school?”