Republican House Gave CDC More Money Than Obama Requested - Granite Grok

Republican House Gave CDC More Money Than Obama Requested

Ebola USAtlanta Business Journal (The CDC is in Atlanta if you forgot)

Jan 17th, 2014 ( That’s 9 months ago)
CDC Wins Big Budget Deal

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will see an 8.2 percent budget increase for fiscal 2014, thanks to a $1.1 trillion spending bill announced by Congress Jan. 13.

This influx of cash will raise the CDC budget to $6.9 billion, which is $567 million more than it received in 2013. This is more than the agency anticipated, because the president’s fiscal year 2014 budget request for it was just $6.6 billion — a decrease of $270 million from fiscal 2012.

Of the $6.9 billion, $1.3 billion was allocated to protect the United States from foreign and domestic threats, both intentional and naturally occurring. $255 million will go to support bio-defense efforts, and $160 million will be set aside for states to address their most pressing public health needs. The CDC will get $30 million for Advanced Molecular Detection (AMD), which will help identify potential disease outbreaks earlier and more accurately.

Obama requested a CDC Budget Decrease.  He wanted them to get $270 million less dollars in 2014.  Republicans voted to give the CDC $567 Million more dollars.

Different article, same site…

Others, including Hillary Clinton, have contended that sequestration’s budget reductions have hurt the Centers for Disease Control’s ability to fight Ebola.

“They’re working heroically, but they don’t have the resources they used to have,” Clinton said of the CDC.

But earlier in that article the author notes that…

But before you blame Republicans for these cuts, it should be noted that NIH”s budget remained flat under both Republican and Democratic presidents. It also didn’t matter whether Republicans or Democrats controlled Congress.

So pointing partisan fingers seems like a silly exercise here. NIH is a small part of the overall federal budget, and the agency’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases accounts for less than 15 percent of NIH’s budget. Money for more Ebola research could have been found, even in an age of budget austerity, if NIH officials knew then what they know now.

Jump to Jindal…

Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, who worked at the Department of Health and Human Services in the early years of President George W. Bush’s administration, took issue with Clinton’s comments in an op-ed in Politico.

“In recent years, the CDC has received significant amounts of funding,” Jindal writes. “Unfortunately, however, many of those funds have been diverted away from programs that can fight infectious diseases, and toward programs far afield from the CDC’s original purpose.”

Far afield?  I think we can agree.  NIH and CDC spending priorities were not at all focused, laser-like, on Ebola vaccine research,

  • $325,525 for a study concluding that wives would argue less with their husbands if they would just calm down quicker.
  • $386,000 to massage rabbits to determine the best length of time for a massage.
  • $939,771 to find out why fruit flies fall in love.
  • $666,905 to see why people like watching Seinfeld re-runs.
  • $350,000 researching how golfers perform better when using their imagination
  • And then you have the why are lesbians so fat study.

Finger pointing will never resolve the real problem, which is to seal up the borders and stop flights from infected countries as a matter of national and economic security.  This is just basic common sense.  If this gets loose the damage would be significant.  Refusing to do so hints at other motivations.  If that happens to be saving the funding for rabbit massage studies breaking ground for a constitutional right to marry fruit-flies, can we at least agree that those issues are not nearly as important as keeping a highly contagious, high mortality virus from menacing blacks, Hispanics, gays, women, children, working families, and our most because Ebola doesn’t care who it kills and neither, apparently, does your government.

 

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