Overall Funding Has Increased Every Year
Hillary Clinton appeared on CNNs Fareed Zakaria GPS Sunday and claimed that President Donald Trump had cut funding to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The Centers for Disease Control had been given the responsibility under the Obama administration to be vigilant and try to get ahead of where viruses like this were formulating, especially if they were animal-to-people transmission viruses, so there was a lot that was done under the Obama administration, said Clinton.
The Trump administration severely cut back the CDC budget, cut back on this program of overseas vigilance, but I don’t think it’s a time to point fingers whether it’s from the past or from the present.
Hillary Clinton is hardly the first person to make this claim. Other Democratic politicians, including the partys frontrunner for presidential nominee Joe Biden, have made the same assertion. Michael Bloomberg accused Trump of slash funding of the CDC and other essential health agencies, Rep. Adam Schiff tweeted that The Trump Administration has slashed CDC funding, and Sen. Brian Schatz claimed Trump cut CDC by 9 percent.
However, while Trump has attempted to cut funding to the CDC, overall funding to the agency has increased under the Trump administration.
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Trump Administration Balks At Funding For Testing And Cdc In Virus Relief Bill
Senate Republicans were infuriated after the Trump administration objected to provisions in a draft proposal, including allocating $25 billion to testing and contact tracing.
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WASHINGTON The Trump administration has balked at providing billions of dollars to fund coronavirus testing and shore up federal health agencies as the virus surges across the country, complicating efforts to reach agreement on the next round of pandemic aid.
Senate Republicans had drafted a proposal that would allocate $25 billion in grants to states for conducting testing and contact tracing, as well as about $10 billion for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and about $15 billion for the National Institutes of Health, according to a person familiar with the tentative plans, who cautioned that the final dollar figures remained in flux. They had also proposed providing $5.5 billion to the State Department and $20 billion to the Pentagon to help counter the virus outbreak and potentially distribute a vaccine at home and abroad.
But in talks over the weekend, administration officials instead pushed to zero out the funding for testing and for the nations top health agencies, and to cut the Pentagon funding to $5 billion, according to another person familiar with the discussions. The people asked for anonymity to disclose private details of the talks, which were first reported by The Washington Post.
Katie Rogers and Alan Rappeport contributed reporting.
Trump’s Rift With Health Experts
Despite Pence’s effort to downplay the severity of Trump’s threats on Wednesday, the president’s tweets nonetheless represent an escalation of Trump’s battle with his own health experts over how to reopen the country.
Earlier this week, Trump directly contradicted the nation’s premier infectious disease specialist, Dr. Anthony Fauci, who is also a key member of the White House Coronavirus Task Force.
“The current state is really not good,” Fauci said Tuesday on Facebook Live. “We are still knee deep in the first wave” of Covid-19 infections, he added.
When asked later in the day about Fauci’s assessment of the current state of the pandemic, Trump replied, “I disagree with him.”
“I think we are in a good place,” the president said in an interview with the “Full Court Press” show. “We’ve done a good job. I think we are going to be in two, three, four weeks … I think we are going to be in very good shape.”
For much of the day Tuesday, Trump and other top officials, including Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, hosted a series of conference calls and public events to push for school reopenings.
“Ultimately, it’s not a matter of if schools need to open, it’s a matter of how,” DeVos said during a conference call with the nation’s governors. “School must reopen, they must be fully operational.” Partial reopenings that combined in-person classes with online learning were unacceptable, she said.
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See Cuts To Prevention And Public Health Fund Puts Cdc Programs At Risk
Other science agencies, such the Food and Drug Administration and NASA, would see a growth in funds. The budget would give the FDA $3.3 billion, approximately $460 million more than it received in 2017, and NASA $19.9 billion, or a 1.3 percent increase. The proposal also allocates funds to fighting the opioid crisis, The New York Times reports: The Drug Enforcement Agency would receive an extra $41 million for this purpose and another $43 million would go toward fighting the opioid epidemic in schools.
Whether the proposal will pass through Congress remains to be seen. According to The New York Times, The blueprint is largely a political statement and is unlikely to influence lawmakers, who control the federal pursestrings.
Covid Pandemic Slashes Life Expectancy Heres Where It Fell The Most
Key background: Trumps budget proposals have historically taken aim at science funding, although the 2021 proposal amps up spending for NASAto get astronauts back on the moonand to build the National Quantum Internet, which would theoretically be impossible to hack, according to the Post. Including HHS and the CDC, other programs possibly facing deep cuts include affordable housing, student loan assistance, Medicaid and food stamps. But the budget will wend its way through the Congressional Budget Office, as well as House and Senate committees and subcommittees, before any dollar amounts are approved by Congress. Presidents budgets are a reflection of administration priorities, but in the end, they are just a list of suggestions, Sen. Michael M. Enzi , who chairs the Senate Budget Committee, told the New York Times Monday.
Tangent: WHO said the coronavirus new name, Covid-19, which comes from coronavirus disease and the year in which it was discovered, was chosen to avoid stigma based on geographical location, the name of an animal, a person or a group of people.
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Trump Budget Chief Holds Firm On Cdc Cuts Amid Virus Outbreak
Russ Vought, the acting director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, on Tuesday doubled down on proposed cuts to health services and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention , despite the coronavirus outbreak.
Vought came under intense questioning from Rep. Matt CartwrightDonald TrumpGraham opposes short-term debt hike, warns against being ‘held hostage’ to filibuster44 percent of Republicans want Trump to run again in 2024: surveyMOREs 2021 budget request. It proposed cutting Health and Human Services funding by $9.5 billion, including a 15 percent cut of $1.2 billion to the CDC and a $35 million decrease to the Infectious Diseases Rapid Response Reserve Fund’s annual contribution.
The question I have is, are we prepared to fight pandemics if we cut from programs that are specifically designed to prepare for them, including the coronavirus? Cartwright asked.
Vought responded by saying Trump signed into law the $8.3 billion emergency supplemental package Congress approved last week.
That funding, a significant increase over the $2.5 billion emergency request the White House sent over, would be spread out over several years. The funding in question at the hearing was for next year’s spending. Cartwright pressed Vought as to whether he would amend the request.
Vought confirmed that the administration was sticking to its request.
If youre asking if Im sending up a budget amendment, no, Im not sending up a budget amendment, he said.
Budget Would Thwart Progress
A few medical groups on Monday quickly criticized Trump’s proposals.
“In a time where our nation continues to face significant public health challenges including 2019 novel coronavirus, climate change, gun violence and costly chronic diseases such as heart disease and cancer the administration should be investing more resources in better health, not cutting federal health budgets,” said Georges C. Benjamin, MD, executive director of the American Public Health Association, in a statement.
David J. Skorton, MD, chief executive and president of the Association of American Medical Colleges also urged increased investment in fighting disease.
“We must continue the bipartisan budget trajectory set forth by Congress over the last several years, not reverse course,” Skorton said in a statement.
Trump’s proposed cuts in medical research “would thwart scientific progress on strategies to prevent, diagnose, treat, and cure medical conditions that affect countless patients nationwide,” he said.
In total, the new 2021 appropriations for HHS would fall by $9.46 billion to $85.667 billion under Trump’s proposal. Appropriations, also called discretionary budget authority, represents the operating budgets for federal agencies. These are decided through annual spending bills.
Congress has separate sets of laws for handling payments the federal government makes through Medicare and Medicaid. These are known as mandatory spending.
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Trumps Who Cutoff Sends Officials Allies Scrambling
One of the presidents top public health officials also distanced himself from the move.
Alex Brandon/AP Photo
04/15/2020 02:24 PM EDT
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President Donald Trumps 60-day freeze on U.S. funding of the World Health Organization was met with swift criticism Wednesday, with defenders of the United Nations agency denouncing the directive as a risky and baffling maneuver amid the very kind of global pandemic it was meant to combat.
Bill Gates, the Microsoft founder and philanthropist who has pledged billions to help speed development of a coronavirus vaccine, tweeted that halting funding for the World Health Organization during a world health crisis is as dangerous as it sounds.
Inside the State Department, officials scrambled to make sense of the White Houses decision. James L. Richardson, the director of U.S. foreign assistance resources, informed his staff in a brief email that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo had instructed diplomats and aid officials to identify and utilize alternative implementers for foreign assistance beyond the WHO.
By taking this approach, Richardson wrote, we can continue our good work on behalf of the American people, while ensuring that U.S. foreign assistance is best positioned to improve the lives of vulnerable people around the world, as Americans have always done.
CORONAVIRUS: WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW
President Donald Trump and Melania Trump have tested positive for Covid-19.
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The Acting Director Of The Omb Seemed Unperturbed When Asked About If It Was Wise To Cut The Cdc During A Pandemic
By Matthew Rozsa
Acting Director of the Office of Management and Budget Russ Vought presses the button that starts the machine that will print copies of US President Donald Trump’s proposed budget for the U.S. Government for the 2021 Fiscal Year are printed at the Government Publishing Office ahead of its release next week on February 6, 2020 in Washington, DC. Once released, the budget will be debated in Congress before it becomes official.
President Donald Trump’s budget director stood by proposed budget cuts to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention despite the ongoing outbreak of COVID-19, better known as the coronavirus.
Russ Vought, the acting director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, told Rep. Matt Cartwright, D-Pa., during a congressional hearing on Tuesday that the administration does not plan on amending its 2021 budget. That budget proposes reducing Health and Human Services funding by $9.5 billion, in the process cutting $1.2 billion from the CDC’s budget and eliminating $35 million from the Infection Diseases Rapid Response Reserve Fund.
Vought initially responded to Cartwright’s question by pointing to the $8.3 billion emergency supplemental package passed by Congress last week. That money would be spread out over many years, however, and had to be increased by Congress from the $2.5 billion initially required by the White House. It also does not impact the CDC’s long term spending priorities.
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