Trump touts biodefense strategy but slashes funding to detect and combat outbreaks like coronavirus, Bulletin of Atomic Scientists
The start:
At the end of January, at a time when the coronavirus outbreak that began in China was dominating international headlines, The White House announced it was forming a new task force to address the growing crisis, one headed by the secretary of health and human services, Alex Azar. Standing up the task force was made easier, the administration said, because of the work it had already put into the National Biodefense Strategy, the government-wide plan from 2018 aimed at protecting the country against threats like disease epidemics and biological terrorism. There’s a problem with that claim however. After a year-and-half of implementation, experts say the government has little to show for the strategy.
“It’s our understanding that it sort of ground to a halt during the assessment phase,” Asha George, the executive director of the Bipartisan Commission on Biodefense, said of the strategy. (George is also a member of the Bulletin’s Science and Security Board.) Seconding George’s assessment is Dan Gerstein, a RAND researcher who has tracked the biodefense strategy: “I stay pretty close on these issues. I haven’t seen a lot come out.”
The strategy sets out to organize the government’s myriad activities intended to defend against biothreats; it’s the “first-ever holistic look across the government to see where are we acting, and where might there be any gaps in light of our awareness of threats, our preparedness needs, and our ability to respond,” Azar told the press in 2018. Under the strategy, officials from various federal agencies are supposed to decide on a joint plan for how to allocate federal resources. It’s in those very areas—joint decision-making and resource-sharing–that government officials are struggling to make progress, a new US Government Accountability Office report published last week found. Many officials “expressed reluctance” to use their resources to support common goals, the report said, and there are “no clear processes, roles, or responsibilities for joint decision-making.”
Experts point to the big cuts the Trump administration has proposed to public health initiatives as a sign that the country, if anything, is becoming more vulnerable to threats like disease outbreaks. For instance, while the strategy calls for a strong surveillance system to monitor for biological threats, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Public Health Preparedness and Response Program, which puts the agency’s laboratories and expertise in public health surveillance and epidemiology to work, is in line for a $25 million cut in the budget year beginning this fall. The Health and Human Services Department’s Hospital Preparedness Program funds the Ebola treatment centers that were set up to handle domestic cases of the disease that was ravaging West African countries in 2014. The program could see an $18 million haircut this fall. The administration’s budget proposal would provide $58 million to the World Health Organization, less than half what the United States gave last year. The organization is the lead international agency guiding the global response to the coronavirus outbreak. “All those things suggest that they are saying one thing and doing another,” Gerstein said.
The rest.
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At the end of January, at a time when the coronavirus outbreak that began in China was dominating international headlines, The White House announced it was forming a new task force to address the growing crisis, one headed by the secretary of health and human services, Alex Azar. Standing up the task force was made easier, the administration said, because of the work it had already put into the National Biodefense Strategy, the government-wide plan from 2018 aimed at protecting the country against threats like disease epidemics and biological terrorism. There’s a problem with that claim however. After a year-and-half of implementation, experts say the government has little to show for the strategy.
“It’s our understanding that it sort of ground to a halt during the assessment phase,” Asha George, the executive director of the Bipartisan Commission on Biodefense, said of the strategy. (George is also a member of the Bulletin’s Science and Security Board.) Seconding George’s assessment is Dan Gerstein, a RAND researcher who has tracked the biodefense strategy: “I stay pretty close on these issues. I haven’t seen a lot come out.”
The strategy sets out to organize the government’s myriad activities intended to defend against biothreats; it’s the “first-ever holistic look across the government to see where are we acting, and where might there be any gaps in light of our awareness of threats, our preparedness needs, and our ability to respond,” Azar told the press in 2018. Under the strategy, officials from various federal agencies are supposed to decide on a joint plan for how to allocate federal resources. It’s in those very areas—joint decision-making and resource-sharing–that government officials are struggling to make progress, a new US Government Accountability Office report published last week found. Many officials “expressed reluctance” to use their resources to support common goals, the report said, and there are “no clear processes, roles, or responsibilities for joint decision-making.”
Experts point to the big cuts the Trump administration has proposed to public health initiatives as a sign that the country, if anything, is becoming more vulnerable to threats like disease outbreaks. For instance, while the strategy calls for a strong surveillance system to monitor for biological threats, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Public Health Preparedness and Response Program, which puts the agency’s laboratories and expertise in public health surveillance and epidemiology to work, is in line for a $25 million cut in the budget year beginning this fall. The Health and Human Services Department’s Hospital Preparedness Program funds the Ebola treatment centers that were set up to handle domestic cases of the disease that was ravaging West African countries in 2014. The program could see an $18 million haircut this fall. The administration’s budget proposal would provide $58 million to the World Health Organization, less than half what the United States gave last year. The organization is the lead international agency guiding the global response to the coronavirus outbreak. “All those things suggest that they are saying one thing and doing another,” Gerstein said.
The rest.
Meanwhile, here's how MAGA we're doing now: