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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsForeign Policy Magazine: Trump Has Sabotaged America's Coronavirus Response
I missed this when published or it would be a LBN post...
For the United States, the answers are especially worrying because the government has intentionally rendered itself incapable. In 2018, the Trump administration fired the governments entire pandemic response chain of command, including the White House management infrastructure. In numerous phone calls and emails with key agencies across the U.S. government, the only consistent response I encountered was distressed confusion. If the United States still has a clear chain of command for pandemic response, the White House urgently needs to clarify what it isIf the United States still has a clear chain of command for pandemic response, the White House urgently needs to clarify what it isnot just for the public but for the government itself, which largely finds itself in the dark.
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In the spring of 2018, the White House pushed Congress to cut funding for Obama-era disease security programs, proposing to eliminate $252 million in previously committed resources for rebuilding health systems in Ebola-ravaged Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea. Under fire from both sides of the aisle, President Donald Trump dropped the proposal to eliminate Ebola funds a month later. But other White House efforts included reducing $15 billion in national health spending and cutting the global disease-fighting operational budgets of the CDC, NSC, DHS, and HHS. And the governments $30 million Complex Crises Fund was eliminated.
In May 2018, Trump ordered the NSCs entire global health security unit shut down, calling for reassignment of Rear Adm. Timothy Ziemer and dissolution of his team inside the agency. The month before, then-White House National Security Advisor John Bolton pressured Ziemers DHS counterpart, Tom Bossert, to resign along with his team. Neither the NSC nor DHS epidemic teams have been replaced. The global health section of the CDC was so drastically cut in 2018 that much of its staff was laid off and the number of countries it was working in was reduced from 49 to merely 10. Meanwhile, throughout 2018, the U.S. Agency for International Development and its director, Mark Green, came repeatedly under fire from both the White House and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. And though Congress has so far managed to block Trump administration plans to cut the U.S. Public Health Service Commissioned Corps by 40 percent, the disease-fighting cadres have steadily eroded as retiring officers go unreplaced.
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https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/01/31/coronavirus-china-trump-united-states-public-health-emergency-response/?fbclid=IwAR1JiD6ltdB9COqrGkWKORRByslT5SgynU1DCn5b37OK6-SfkRMnA6-l0Nc
hlthe2b
(102,217 posts)as well as the pass-through funds to support state and local public health response.
We are likely facing the worst emerging infection in decades yet are singularly unprepared.
This is what electing a man beyond ignorance and totally unqualified but whose narcissism convinces him otherwise will cost us.
SunSeeker
(51,550 posts)trof
(54,256 posts)Read the entire article.
Not you, other responders.
The various federal public health agencies were turf fighters who didn't communicate with each other.
Obama made them come into line and into a more cooperative ( as opposed to competitive) body.
Donnie Two-Scoops has screwed that up by taking funding away for his bundock wall and replacing knowledgeable people with tRump loyalists.
stillcool
(32,626 posts)and he has had his hands all over federal agencies. It truly is a Republicans dream come true, a gutted federal government. They probably are hopeful that something will take a few thousand of us out. We're on our own, or worse...there are people in power that would prefer to hurt then help.