Bigger than Trump
The U.S. government failed the country
In the middle of this pandemic, I can’t get out of my mind that the budget for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention last year was $7.2 billion. This year, it will set a record of $7.9 billion. That’s an incredible sum. The Food and Drug Administration, the other critical agency for controlling disease, has a comparable $5.7 billion budget. The World Health Organization is funded by the U.S. to the tune of $453 million, by far the biggest contributor.
The federal agencies tasked with preparing for a pandemic response are also numerous and absorb a huge amount of federal dollars. Judge Glock, a policy analyst at the Cicero Institute, explains: “The acronyms of those agencies that are supposed to organize a response to a communicable disease crisis include, but are not limited to, the ASPR, CDC, DGMQ, NCEZID, USSG, HHS, FEMA, FDA, NIAID, DOD, DHS, NSC, CTF, and associated subagencies and divisions and offices.”
And one might imagine that all of this kind of spending would help us, you know, control disease. But nah. COVID-19 took a brief glance at these hugely expensive bodies and carried on its culling of the population unmolested. In the most critical disease outbreak in a century, all these wellfunded groups turned out to be incapable of making any kind of difference when it mattered. Their lines of command are confusing, and their legislative mandates overlap. Plans for preparedness are so manifold, no one knows quite which one to pick. The result is that we were ready for an epidemic like the one we’re enduring. In fact, we were perhaps overly prepared. The trouble has been incompetence.
Yes, it did not help that the Trump administration significantly cut the CDC presence in China in the past two years, but it should have been perfectly possible for the staff that remained to stay on top of the most infectious and deadly pandemic disease in a century. In December 2019, after all, the heroic whistleblower, Li Wenliang, had broken the news of a new SARS-like coronavirus spreading in Wuhan.
But the CDC and the WHO trusted the Chinese government to help them — and the communist dictatorship was determined at first to hush up the outbreak. According to PolitiFact: “Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar did make the effort to get U.S. experts inside. The department reached out to China in the first week of January, and Secretary Azar asked his Chinese counterpart again in late January. China resisted outsiders, both from the U.S. and WHO.”
But it is also true — and this is critical — that the WHO head, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, was in direct communication with the Chinese dictatorship, and was naive to trust them; and on Jan. 10, the Chinese published the genetic sequence for the disease. Maybe we lost a couple of weeks, but after that, we no longer needed the Chinese, or the WHO. We had the data; we needed a plan of action.
The CDC initiated an attempt to create a test for COVID-19, achieving it in a mere seven days. But somehow they mucked it up, and we still have no good explanation why. Did they rush it? Or were they the most incompetent disease control agency on the planet? The test, first used in New York, turned out to be flawed and effectively useless. More to the point, once a public emergency had been declared, FDA regulations prevented private parties from creating a more effective test. A test emerged from the WHO, but the CDC did not throw everything overboard to adopt it. And, again, we still don’t really know why.
The FDA, for its part, refused to lift the mind-numbing bureaucratic procedures to expedite independent labs from creating a viable test. And so we were flying blind — and we still are. Billions and billions of dollars over decades for multiple agencies and legislation passed last year precisely to prevent such an outbreak — and here we are, with no end in sight, forced to stay inside because the fully funded federal machine could not move fast enough, and when it did, failed a core competency test.
You can assail President Donald Trump’s pathetic and incoherent response. I’m not going to quibble. But this was much deeper than merely Mr. Trump’s failure. It was and is the failure of the entire federal bureaucracy, which has been exorbitantly funded to prevent exactly such an emergency and spectacularly, unforgivably, failed.