Comments by "" (@DavidJ222) on "Sen. Rick Scott to spring breakers: What are you thinking?" video.
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When Ebola broke out in West Africa in 2014, President Obama recognized that responding to the outbreak overseas, while also protecting Americans at home, involved multiple U.S. government departments and agencies, none of which were speaking to one another.
So to bring order and harmony to the chaos, he create a coherent multiagency response overseas and on the homefront. Building on the Ebola experience, President Obama set up a permanent epidemic monitoring and command group inside the White House National Security Council, and another in the Department of Homeland Security—both of which followed the scientific and public health leads of the National Institutes of Health, and the CDC, and the diplomatic advice of the State Department.
But that’s all gone now. In May 2018, Trump ordered the NSC’s entire global health security unit shut down. This was the directorate charged with preparing for when, not if, another pandemic would hit the nation.
Trump’s elimination of the office suggested, along with his proposed budget cuts for the CDC, that he did not see or comprehend the threat of pandemics. Trump said that COVID-19 “came out of nowhere” and “blindsided the world.” His comments left scientists, doctors, and national security experts in a state of shock. Because experts had been warning about the next pandemic for years.
“One year later I was mystified when the White House dissolved the office, leaving the country less prepared for pandemics like COVID-19,” Beth Cameron, the first director of the unit, wrote in an op-ed. She said the directorate was set up to be the “smoke alarm” and get ahead of emergencies and sound a warning at the earliest sign of fire — “all with the goal of avoiding a six-alarm fire.”
In the spring of 2018, Trump pushed Congress to cut funding for Obama-era disease security programs, reducing $15 billion in national health spending and cutting the global disease-fighting operational budgets of the CDC, NSC, DHS, and HHS. And the government’s $30 million Complex Crises Fund was eliminated.
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