Tony Charuvastra ’96 MD’02, P’28 wants someone to write a screenplay about a defining crisis in the career of Stephen Cha ’94 MD’00, his best friend from medical school. In 2022, when Cha was counselor to the secretary of US Health and Human Services, the nation faced a dire infant formula shortage, and Cha—an internist and health policy expert—was tasked with getting formula to the US from abroad until domestic production was up and running again.
“It’s got everything—it’s got babies, it’s got Air Force planes carrying formula,” says Charuvastra, a psychiatrist in New York City. “And it’s a great example of how someone who understands the vital importance of every step of that can also actually pull that whole thing together and get it done.”
As the lead of Operation Fly Formula, Cha coordinated dozens of flights that imported millions of pounds of formula, and prioritized access for babies with specialized diets and families on food assistance. But nowhere in the months of press releases and news stories about those missions was Cha mentioned. His starring role in the production was known only to those behind the scenes.
“A lot of people don’t necessarily know what he does, and I think he’s not so motivated by accolades,” Charuvastra says. “He wants to do what’s right.”
So when New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill nominated Cha commissioner of the state’s Department of Human Services last year, friends were gratified that he was finally gaining the recognition and status he deserved. “An individual [in that position] can have a significant influence on the health of that state,” Eric Fleegler ’94, MD, MPH, says. “And what greater person would you want than somebody like Steve?”
Cha is the first to acknowledge his “life of privilege”: growing up on Chicago’s North Shore, son and grandson of physicians, Ivy League education. But he knows how hard his parents worked for that. “My father was born in North Korea, and came across the border when he was a kid,” he says. In South Korea, “my mother saw her home and factory bombed before her eyes.” They moved to the US when Cha’s dad, a radiologist, got an H1-B visa despite restrictions on immigration from Asia that were still in place. In Chicago he founded a Korean American advocacy organization that’s still serving immigrants today. “Both being a physician and being active in your community was what I grew up around,” Cha says.
In high school, Cha headed a student group that organized volunteer projects, where Sarah Ruhl ’97 MFA’01, P’28 met him. “He’s always been very service minded,” she says. He also played first chair cello in the school orchestra and was a top student. “He’s a Renaissance man,” says Ruhl, a Pulitzer- and Tony-nominated playwright who first bonded with Charuvastra, now her husband, over their friendship with Cha.
At Brown, Cha became fast friends with 10 freshman-year dormmates, including Fleegler; they and their families are all still close to this day. A political science concentrator in the Program for Liberal Medical Education, Cha interned with the state legislature and worked to launch Rhode Island’s first syringe exchange program. After graduation he went to Washington, DC, for two years to advocate for Clinton health care reform and against a Medicaid block grant proposal. He returned to the Medical School after deciding “that as much as I loved fighting for Medicaid, I never met people on Medicaid, and I wanted to be a part of the health care force in that way,” Cha says. “I liked the idea of not just being a doctor [but] of being someone’s doctor.”
After residency at Montefiore and a Robert Wood Johnson clinical fellowship at Yale, Cha went back to DC in 2006 as professional staff on two House Committees and then in leadership roles at the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services. Throughout his years in the capital, he also worked part time treating patients at a homeless shelter. “Even in the middle of the height of health reform, when we were working around the clock … I would go take care of clinic hours,” Cha says. “Fighting these fights during the day, sometimes you feel like you’re banging your head against a wall. And at night, you can get someone’s blood pressure better. You can take care of someone who has active needs.”
At HHS, Cha helped coordinate the COVID-19 response across the department. During vaccine shortages, as well as the infant formula shortage, he wanted a “real-time understanding of what it’s like to real people on the ground,” so he asked “everybody” to text him about any problems. “I would spend half the day on the phone tracking these cases down, and then half the day figuring out what policy problem we need to fix,” he says. Fleegler, a pediatric emergency physician and health services researcher at Massachusetts General Hospital, saw this firsthand on their families’ annual summer vacations, when Cha seemed to work “24/7.”
“Steve being on the front line, and us having the opportunity to hear some of his stories, and to watch him doing it, was such an incredible honor and amazing thing,” he says.
As a political appointee, Cha left HHS on Jan. 20, 2025. He took up the cello again—he’d played solo and in several ensembles at Brown—and did some consulting work. Though he says he enjoyed the down time, Ruhl says, “He was deeply worried about what would happen” at HHS. Last year’s bill cutting billions in federal Medicaid and SNAP spending brought Cha back to the front lines. In announcing his nomination as DHS commissioner last year, Sherrill said, “Dr. Cha brings the experience and expertise we need to protect New Jerseyans.”
Cha is “a very proud New Jerseyan now.” He went to his first Springsteen concert, and he and his wife, a licensed professional counselor in DC, found a condo near the train in Princeton Junction, so she can commute to her practice. Their son is a junior at Oberlin.
Springsteen’s Land of Hopes and Dreams tour “was inspirational,” Cha says. “I thought about the work this department did at multiple points … about how we work to lift up people, how we work to fight for people’s rights, how we work to ensure that people have access to the care and the things they need.” Cha knows he sounds like a politician when he says things like that. But his friends say he means every word. As Charuvastra put it, “He’s really the real deal.”