As I write this, I am not confident enough to say in any real way whether the economic shutdown that we are currently experiencing was necessary or not. There are non-hysterical arguments to be made on both sides of the question.
One of the things that seems clear to me is that the CDC and the FDA were not prepared for this pandemic. This is despite the fact that America spends enormous amounts of money on these bureaucracies. Is it way past time to take a close look at how these agencies spend our tax dollars?
Let’s look at the CDC. The CDC was created in 1942 as the Office of National Defense Malaria Control Activities, and in 1946 was renamed the Communicable Disease Center. Today it makes up one of the 13 major operating components of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). For many decades it focused its full efforts on its original mission: viruses and communicable diseases.
However, during the last few decades mission creep has run rampant in the agency. It had widened its work to include chronic diseases and addictions, nutrition, school health and injuries. More recently it has conducted studies on gun violence and how parents should discipline their children. How such activities support the core mission is unclear. Keep in mind that these kinds of activities consume hundreds of millions even billions of dollars in expenditures. All these purposes are addressed by other federal agencies.
In 2017 alone, the CDC spent over $1.1 billion on chronic disease prevention and health promotion, $215 million on environmental health, and $285 million on injury prevention. Could this money have been better spent to prepare for a pandemic or other epidemic outbreak? Could this money have been used to replenish the national stockpile of masks and ventilators? And why did it take the CDC five years to approve a new design for ventilators?
Back in 2007, the late Senator Tom Coburn issued a well-documented report entitled, “CDC Off Center.” It showed that the agency tasked with fighting and preventing disease spent hundreds of millions of tax dollars for failed prevention efforts, international junkets and lavish facilities. At the same time, it could not demonstrate that it was controlling disease.
One of the more egregious examples of this is HIV/AIDS funding. HIV was the scourge of the 1980’s. In the 1980’s HIV began killing tens of thousands of people a year in the U.S. and hundreds of thousands world wide. Antiviral treatments were developed that helped but were not as successful as hoped. Protease inhibitors came along that were a lot more helpful. However, the long term outlook for patients was not good because eventually the infection became resistant.
In the mid 1990’s two researchers who were not funded by the CDC discovered a treatment regimen that changed the disease from a lethal one to a chronic condition. Viral loads would be effectively wiped out but the patients needed to stay on the treatment to prevent a recurrence. This would be similar to how the chicken pox virus can stay hidden for years and then reappear as shingles.
The CDC has been allocating between $550 million and $1 billion to AIDS prevention and research annually with no detectable results in a diminishment of the rate of infection in this country. This is an inexcusable failure that despite billions of dollars in CDC HIV prevention efforts. Each year an estimated 40,000 new people in the U.S. contract HIV, a communicable and preventable disease.
Any attempts at oversight or even to question grant expenditures are usually met with extremely heavy resistance and frequent ad hominem attacks on the questioner. These attacks are directed at standard oversight practices, such as auditing grantees’ financial records. These are expected practices in other industries. Here public relations campaigns and cries to the media of partisan motivation are the standard.
Why? Are the people receiving grants more interested in continuing to receive money than in saving lives? Are there political considerations in continuing to fund all this money with no resulting reduction in infection rates? Is there an “AIDS industry” that has grown up around and makes a living off government funding?
This reminds one of the Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty. His Great Society programs were supposed to eliminate poverty in this country. Fifty years later when PDJT took office the poverty rate in this country was exactly the same as it had been when the War on Poverty started. This was despite trillions of dollars expended. All that had been accomplished was to make generations of families dependent on government dole.
Is this what has happened to the CDC? Have they reached a point in the life of this agency where the best thing would be to dissolve the agency and start over with a new focus on its core mission? Have they become too bureaucratic to respond nimbly to emerging threats to the health and well-being of Americans? Are they too interested in feathering their own nests that in actually meeting the goals of the agency?
After this crisis has passed, a hard look is needed at how our tax dollars are being used at these agencies.