Monday, February 24, 2020

Hey Donnie, maybe cutting disease control wasn't such a great idea.

It's truly amazing that Republicans were trying to promote a cut to the Centers for Disease Control as recently as 2 weeks ago.



But it's not the first time that Trump/GOP measures have hurt the nation's preparedness for a major health crisis. Joan McCarter has an excellent rundown in Daily Kos that describes how the groundwork for the fiasco that we have today was two years in the making by the Trump White House. And it's in the classic GOP tradition of "deconstruction" of government services and effectivness.
Let's start back in April 2018 when then-national security advisor pressured Tom Bossert, who was in charge of the Department of Homeland Security's global health efforts, to resign along with his whole team. Then a month later, the White House forced out Bossert's counterpart at the national security council, Rear Adm. Timothy Ziemer, and eliminated his entire team which was responsible for leading the U.S. response to deadly pandemics. There is no senior administration official now solely responsible for global health security, coordinating and directing the various departments among the agencies responsible for public health and epidemic response. That's barely the beginning of this administration's failures, though.

Even before that, the Centers for Disease Control was forced to cut 80% of its efforts at preventing global disease outbreaks because its funding had been so severely reduced. The cuts to staff were so drastic that the number of countries the CDC was working in reduced from 49 to just 10. The cuts to the CDC and other health programs would continue in the latest Trump budget: a 10% cut to Health and Human Services; another 16% cut to the CDC; cuts to the World Health Organization of 53% and to the Pan American Health Organization of 75%; and $3 billion from global health programs among agencies.

What the cuts that have already been made to CDC mean is that it is hampered in screening for coronavirus. Right now, there's a problem with the CDC's test for the virus, so only three of the more than 100 public health labs around the country have verified the CDC's test for use. Right now, the test is also very expensive at $250 a pop and the HHS doesn't have the funds readily available to cover that as well as the rest of the response to the outbreak. The administration is planning to request emergency funds from Congress, but it could be as little as $1 billion. That's not going to go very far when just one screening test costs $250. In comparison, the Obama White House requested $6 billion to fight the 2014 Ebola outbreak, receiving $5.4 billion from Congress.

Add on top of that simple and gross mismanagement by the administration, when the State Department was allowed to overrule the CDC and allow 14 passengers from the Diamond Princess who were infected but without symptoms to fly home to the U.S. with uninfected passengers. Even with that happening a week ago, it was clear that asymptomatic people could transmit the virus.
See, that’s the thing about spending money to prepare for disasters – if you don’t pay for it, it’s not there when you need it. And if you don't have staff making those preparations, or hire a bunch of hacks that you tend to screw it up once.

Instead, this is what Trump's point man on dealing with coronavirus was doing today.


This is the problem that results from having a President and a GOP that has no interest in governing, just in grabbing power by any means necessary, and making decisions based on cruelty and trolling vs any kind of positive outcome. And a main part of this involves taking away the funding and influence of bureaucrats who put the needs of the American people ahead of needs of political hacks.

Compare that response to what someone who actually believes in governance sounds like.



I did notice today that Trump was desperately saying that he would ask Congress for an additional $1 billion in funding to fight coronavirus in the US (hey, at least the scare over this disease has made it dirt cheap to borrow more money). ut that's far too late at this point in the game, both here and in other countries.

And Trump’s main concern with coronavirus has nothing to do with an increasing amount of people suffering from an ailment that we are struggling to stop. Instead the real problem in Trumpworld is the fact that this disease is hurting the global economy, which was a big reason the DOW plunged by more than 1,000 points during Monday’s trading.

See, Trump/GOP knows that if our current stock market Bubble pops for good, and continues to tumble throughout 2020, it takes any chances Trump has of re-election with it. Because in GOP World, it's all about elections and the use of power. Stabilizing and improving the country once they gain office? HAH!

PS- I swear I had not read this guy's tweet when I said that Trump's bigger concern about coronavirus was because of what it would do to Wall Street.

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