 That’s pretty much the only logical explanation to the comments made last week
by the head of the National Institutes of Health and some members of Congress,
who argue that budget cuts at the NIH and the Centers for Disease Control hurt
the agencies’ ability to be prepared for the international Ebola outbreak.
Photo by Centers for Disease Control
Photo by Centers for Disease Control
EBOLA: Never wanting to waste a good crisis, some members of Congress and other
federal officials are using the Ebola outbreak to call for more federal
spending, despite bad track records by the CDC and NIH.
“NIH has been working on Ebola vaccines since 2001. It’s not like we suddenly
woke up and thought, ‘Oh my gosh, we should have something ready here,’” Dr.
Francis Collins, the head of the NIH, told the Huffington Post last week.
He said the agency would “probably” have developed a vaccine by now if it hadn’t
seen a “10 year slide” in support for research.
The same day, the Huffington Post argued that the CDC and NIH had been “hobbled”
by more than $600 million in funding cuts over the past five years.
“There’s no doubt that the deep health care cuts that we’ve seen have made it
more difficult to respond in a rapid and comprehensive way to the Ebola
outbreak,” U.S. Rep. Chris Van Hollen, D-Maryland, said on CNN.
Even once-and-future presidential candidate Hilary Clinton got into the act,
arguing in an op-ed that spending cuts created by the congressional
sequestration “were really starting to hurt” the CDC and other public health
agencies.
And by the middle of this week, the issue had turned entirely political.
A new ad from the Agenda Project Action Fund, left-leaning super PAC, outright
blamed Republicans for budget cuts that allowed Ebola to become a threat in the
American homeland.
The whole thing is meant to reduce public debate over government spending to a
single, obvious point: budget cuts can literally kill people.
Would handing over more money to the CDC and the NIH have helped prevent the
current Ebola outbreak? Perhaps.
But given the two agencies’ recent history, there is plenty of evidence to
suggest that those extra funds would have been used in other, less productive,
ways.
The CDC, for example, was busted in 2007 by Oklahoma Republican U.S. Sen. Tom
Coburn’s office for a litany of questionable spending decisions.
Among them: spending $1.75 million over seven years on a “Hollywood liaison”
whose job was to help movie and television studios develop accurate plot lines
about diseases. To pay the position, the CDC tapped into an account that was
supposed to be used to develop responses to bio-terrorism.
Making matters worse, the head of the Hollywood liaison office was found to be a
former CDC employee who landed in one of the cushiest semi-retirements ever
dreamed up by the federal government.
That spending might have brought more scripted realism to House, Grey’s Anatomy
and General Hospital, but it didn’t do squat to help combat Ebola or any other
real world disease.
PRIORITIES: The CDC’s shiny new Arlen Specter Headquarters and Emergency
Operations Center in Atlanta contains more than $10 million of brand-new office
furniture.
The CDC also spent lavishly on a new headquarters and visitor center that opened
in 2006 – even though the agency already had one visitor center, and it’s hard
to imagine many tourists wanting to check out something like the CDC.
The agency blew through more than $10 million in new office furniture and built
a $200,000 fitness center and $30,000 sauna on-site.
Even when the CDC was combating disease, it was wasting money, Coburn’s team
found.
Though the agency spent more than $2.6 billion on grants for HIV and AIDS
research over five years, the CDC acknowledged that many of those grants “have
no objectives” or were otherwise useless. They kept funding them anyway.
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“Many times the answer is to spend more money instead of redirecting
the money or eliminating the waste,” Thomas Schatz, president of
Citizens Against Government Waste, a nonprofit that tracks poor
spending decisions by Congress and the federal bureaucracy, told
Watchdog.org this week. “Programs that are completely ineffective
might get cut by a few percentage points or something, but the
wasteful spending still exists.”
And who can forget the CDC’s attempt to eliminate syphilis? In 1999,
the agency asked Congress to give them extra funding for a special
project meant to practically eliminate syphilis in the United States
by 2005.
Congress responded by doubling the CDC’s budget for syphilis-related
programs, and the CDC spent that extra money on drag shows and
invited porn stars and strippers to speak at public events.
By 2005, not only did syphilis still exist, but the number of
reported cases had increased by 68 percent.
This is the same agency that we’re now being told could have
prevented Ebola if only it hadn’t seen its funding reduced over the
past few years.
“This review of recent CDC expenditures demonstrates that a
re-prioritization of CDC funding and a review of the approach to
certain types of disease prevention are in order,” Coburn’s team
concluded.
Since being embarrassed by Coburn’s report, the CDC’s track record
has not exactly improved.
The agency has received more than $3 billion from a new research
fund created by the Affordable Care Act, but has spent only $180
million of that bounty on researching dangerous diseases.
Instead, it has budgeted millions of dollars each year for community
grants aimed at convincing Americans to make smart choices about
their health — essentially, taxpayer-funded advertising telling you
to put down that giant soda and eat more salad.
Other grants awarded with Obamacare dollars have helped prop-up
farmers markers and fund the installation of bike lanes, all of
which are nice things to have — unless they’re coming at the expense
of more important priorities, like researching deadly diseases.
The NIH has been no better.
As Mollie Hemingway points out at The Federalist, the NIH has seen
its funding increase by 900 percent since 1970 — so much for those
“funding slides” Collins was complaining about — and the NIH’s share
of Department of Health and Human Services spending will top $958
billion this year.
Again, it comes down to a question of priorities. Because the NIH
certainly has enough money to put towards Ebola research, if it
wanted to.
Instead, the NIH has funded studies that included feeding cocaine to
Japanese quail, finding out why lesbians are fat and getting monkeys
sexually aroused.
If the CDC and NIH had more taxpayer money, it’s possible they would
use it all to conduct round-the-clock research on an Ebola vaccine.
But it’s also possible — maybe even likely, given the history here —
that they would blow that extra cash on another round of
questionable decisions and then come back to Congress and the
American people, pleading poverty and blaming budget cuts for why
the important stuff didn’t get done.
Schatz says the blame should extend beyond the two agencies in
question. If there really was such a need for spending at the NIH
and CDC, Congress could easily find wasteful programs in other parts
of government and direct those dollars to public health.
“Prioritization runs across the entire government,” he said. “When
members of Congress come out and say something is underfunded, we
should ask ‘how many times have you proposed eliminating a wasteful
program and redirecting those funds?’”
Boehm can be reached at EBoehm@Watchdog.org and follow @EricBoehm87
on Twitter for more.
[This
article courtesy of
Watchdog.]
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