Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal, responding to Hillary Clinton’s attempt to blame sequestration for Ebola, adds another example of managerial ineptitude in an article at Politico Magazine that notes much of the CDC’s funding has been “diverted away from programs that can fight infectious diseases, and toward programs far afield from CDC’s original purpose.” Consider the Prevention and Public Health Fund, a new series of annual mandatory appropriations created by Obamacare. Over the past five years, the CDC has received just under $3 billion in transfers from the fund. Yet only 6 percent—$180 million—of that $3 billion went toward building epidemiology and laboratory capacity. Especially given the agency’s postwar roots as the Communicable Disease Center, one would think that “detecting and responding to infectious diseases and other public health threats” warrants a larger funding commitment. Instead, the Obama administration has focused the CDC on other priorities. While protecting Americans from infectious diseases received only $180 million from the Prevention Fund, the community transformation grant program received nearly three times as much money—$517.3 million over the same five-year period. The CDC’s website makes clear the objectives of community transformation grants. The program funds neighborhood interventions like “increasing access to healthy foods by supporting local farmers and developing neighborhood grocery stores,” or “promoting improvements in sidewalks and street lighting to make it safe and easy for people to walk and ride bikes.” Bike lanes and farmer’s markets may indeed help a community—but they would do little to combat dangerous diseases like Ebola, SARS or anthrax. Jindal notes that these might be worthy projects, but not only are they diverting funds away from what most Americans think the CDC ought to be doing, they represent the sort of “non-essential priorities” that a federal government with $18 trillion in accumulated debt should not be spending money on. I would add that this kind of agency mission creep is the reason we have so much redundant spending, a topic that frequently comes up in Senator Coburn’s Wastebook. It’s not uncommon to see a dozen different agencies running entirely separate programs to cover the same problem or perceived social need. I don’t suppose we’d have to look very hard to find other federal programs addressing “access to healthy foods,” support for neighborhood grocery stores, or improvements in sidewalks and street lighting. Also, the CDC does not exist in a vacuum. This bloated government wastes oceans of cash on a broad spectrum of indulgences, luxuries, handouts to cronies, and bonuses to top bureaucrats. Any or all of that money could be directed to the Centers for Disease Control. We don’t have an under-funded government. We have a bad government. It’s managed by people – from President Obama on down – who treat their most serious duties and responsibilities with disdain, while pouring our money into endeavors that yield increased power, political rewards, or personal comfort. The Ineptocracy is designed to reward that kind of behavior, or at least ensure no one is aware of it… until a major crisis hits, and suddenly the masters of the State claim to be flat broke. The house is on fire, but there aren’t any fire extinguishers in the emergency boxes. The plane is going down, but there aren’t any parachutes. The ship just hit an iceberg, but there aren’t any lifeboats. Sorry, folks, we spent all the money for those things on perks, benefits, and building bureaucratic monuments named after the senators who sponsored them. We could have squeezed a couple of fire extinguishers, parachutes, and lifeboats into the budget after we passed out this year’s lavish bonuses (and paid for a first-class hotel in Vegas to host the Bonus Check Distribution and Back-Patting Extravaganza – you don’t expect us to stuff five-figure checks into a six-figure administrator’s in-box without a ceremony, do you?) but… darn it, those hateful penny-pinching Republicans wouldn’t give us the extra money we requested to do our actual jobs! This new “blame Republicans for Ebola” drive is just a slight variation on the normal procedure in Washington. Usually they respond to threats of fiscal restraint by screaming that the first dollar of budget cuts means cops, teachers, and first responders will get pink slips, while the princes of the bureaucracy remain safely ensconced in their luxurious fortresses. Remember all this the next time you hear a huckster like Obama peddle some “balanced approach” where he promises to reduce the deficit with a combination of tax increases today, followed by spending cuts in the dim future. On the off chance those spending cuts actually happen, they’ll be blamed for every subsequent government failure… just like the only tiny speck of budget control in the Budget Control Act of 2011 will be blamed for every federal fumble for the next 20 years. As for the matter at hand, Fox News reports considerable pushback against the “protocol breach” excuse for the second Ebola case, which some say is tantamount to blaming the victim: Some say the case shows how many hospitals are inadequately trained to handle the virus, which has killed more than 4,000 people during the latest outbreak in West Africa. “You don’t scapegoat and blame when you have a disease outbreak,” Bonnie Castillo of National Nurses United told Reuters on Sunday. “We have a system failure. That is what we have to correct.” “We haven’t provided [caregivers] with a national training program. We haven’t provided them with the necessary experts that have actually worked in hospitals with Ebola,” said Dr. Gavin McGregor-Skinner of Penn State University, an expert in public health preparedness. Separately, some have raised concerns that no single person or agency is in charge of the U.S. response. You liberals are seriously going to try blaming that on sequestration? The CDC couldn’t even manage a national training program for the great new health crisis of the decade, but they had plenty of money to study angry wives. The kind of management needed to coordinate this response isn’t a question of money anyway – it’s a question of leadership. You know, the thing President Obama fakes by spending 45 seconds holding a phone and looking concerned about Ebola before he jets off to shoot his two hundredth round of golf.
Posted on: Mon, 13 Oct 2014 14:50:21 +0000
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