8 ms·

I've heard there are budget cuts being done, they've completely gutted the staff of the CDC. Morons in charge seems to be a leading factor.

bluGill 7y ago
It is an election year. One says says Trump cut needless dead weight and there is still plenty of staff. The other side is going to play this crisis and call it a gutting.
- aaomidi 7y ago
  Are you seriously arguing the cuts to CDCs budget is not needless? Stop making politics a spectator sport. There's lives on the fucking line.
  - FillardMillmore 7y ago
    Can Congress vote to provide emergency funding to the CDC to make up for the cuts?
    - bilekas 7y ago
      Not to go too off topic and political but could you see any republicans going up in direct contrast to Trump saying : 'all is under control' ? I certainly cant. And as shameful and sad as it sounds, until people start dying.. I don't see much movement on this.
      - gnulinux 7y ago
        It's going to be very late once people start dying. COVID-19 takes about 2 weeks to develop severe pneumonia. Once dozens of people start dying, assuming 1% fatality, there would be thousands of patients 2 weeks ago, spreading exponentially.
    - Ididntdothis 7y ago
      You can’t just spin up this capability quickly once it has been lost. There is lot of experience needed
    - davidw 7y ago
      Maybe, but it's probably not like, say, ditch digging, where you round up some people with strong backs and hand them shovels and get to work. Probably takes time to ramp up. The time to do that was a few months back.
    - acdha 7y ago
      Put this in a more familiar context: say the CDC had just been rooted by a bunch of hackers. How much time would it take for Congress to cut a check versus setting up the organization structure, hiring highly-skilled in-demand people, getting them on-board and trained up with the environment, and letting them learn enough about the systems to start hardening them, etc.? This kind of capacity takes years to develop even if you can cut it quickly.
    - dragonwriter 7y ago
      No, for reasons very similar to those which The Mythical Man-Month explains often prevent throwing more resources at a late software project.
      - FillardMillmore 7y ago
        Thanks for all the responses everyone - I understood this concept but failed to apply it here (where it most certainly does apply). Dont know if anyone is still keeping tabs on this thread, but apparently Trump's "CDC budget cuts" are a falsehood. He proposed cuts but was overruled by congress. In fact, CDC received an increase in funding. See the following link: https://apnews.com/49de80242dd8b58bd34af7cb19f1323a https://apnews.com/49de80242dd8b58bd34af7cb19f1323a > MIKE BLOOMBERG: “There’s nobody here to figure out what the hell we should be doing. And he’s defunded — he’s defunded Centers for Disease Control, CDC, so we don’t have the organization we need. This is a very serious thing.” — Democratic presidential debate Tuesday. JOE BIDEN, comparing the Obama-Biden administration with now: “We increased the budget of the CDC. We increased the NIH budget. ... He’s wiped all that out. ... He cut the funding for the entire effort.” THE FACTS: They’re both wrong to say the agencies have seen their money cut. Bloomberg is repeating the false allegation in a new ad that states the U.S. is unprepared for the virus because of “reckless cuts” to the CDC. Trump’s budgets have proposed cuts to public health, only to be overruled by Congress, where there’s strong bipartisan support for agencies such as the CDC and NIH. Instead, financing has increased.
  - ralusek 7y ago
    I don't understand this argument, what if the CDC was actually overstaffed? Do you know? I have no idea... Lives are always on the line when it comes to disease, but we have never placed an infinite value on human life. By your logic and morality, the CDC should receive additional funding and staffing until there are 0 deaths from disease every year, regardless of diminishing returns. What if increasing funding and staffing of the CDC by 100x reduced the incidence of flu-related deaths by 10%, would your justification mandate this? To call the cuts "needless" and justify it by arguing that "there are lives on the line" is simply not a good argument unless you are willing to take the argument to its extreme conclusion. If instead what you are arguing is that you believe that the previous budget and staffing was at a correct figure, and that you believe that the increase in body count that will come as a result of the adjustment of that figure (which I doubt is knowable at this moment at time, or if it is even greater than 0) is not a worthwhile tradeoff, then that is a completely different argument.
    - Loughla 7y ago
      Your entire premise is based on a basic logical fallacy. You absolutely do not have to take the argument to its extreme, and that is literally called an appeal to extremes. The argument made was that cutting the CDC, and leadership related to global pandemics was probably a bad idea now that we may be experiencing one. Not that we should spend all of our money on the CDC regardless of returns.
      - ralusek 7y ago
        But that's precisely my point. I'm not saying that you or the OP is actually arguing the extreme of the position, I'm saying that the argument that "cutting the budget is needless" because "lives are on the line" implies the extreme unless you are willing to accept that there is a correct amount of diminishing returns where we would agree that cuts to the budget were not needless, but justifiable, regardless of lives being on the line. So if we accept that we both agree that there is a figure where this tradeoff takes place, then what I'd like to know is why the previous figure was correct, and the figure post-cuts is not.
- bilekas 7y ago
  >The other side is going to play this crisis I would prefer to have more people looking into this than less.. The idea of err on the side of caution really does apply right now.
  - bluGill 7y ago
    Is there any reason to believe the people Trump fired are useful to look into this, or are they just "middle management" overhead that would get in the way? I haven't looked into the details. So far this entire thread has made me conclude nobody else has either - instead they are spinning it into good/bad trump while pretending to be neutral.
- jethro_tell 7y ago
  There's no sides here, and the particular reason for failure doesn't matter. This is a disease that will kill people. Letting people go untested out into the wild is not going to help. People fuck up, that's what people do, leaders catch and acknowledge failure early and try to fix it. Unfortunately, at this point, people will die that didn't have to. And that's going to be because: 1. Tons of people weren't tested that should have been. 2. People can't afford to get a test because of the health insurance situation in this country. Aggressive no cost testing would help, I'm sure trump is going to announce that here any minute for a problem that he doesn't think is real.
  - onceUponADime 7y ago
    Dont forget the problem of declaring people ilegal and pushing other population groups (drug addicts) with draconian measures into the underground, where they infect one another in horrible conditions, and make any quarantine impossible. If any measure should be take, then for the time of the epidemic, the ICE and similar agencys - should be frozzen or recommendered to the CDC, and a general amnesty for any illegal health related problem announced.Im certain that seems insane to some conservatives, but the other approach is self-sabotage on a titanic level.
    - jethro_tell 7y ago
      This is true for sure. This virus will be hiding in the corners of society for a while and will keep popping up for a bit.
  - s1artibartfast 7y ago
    I find your post really interesting and am having trouble unpacking it. It seems to me that there are many contradictions, but perhaps I missunderstood. You say that there are no sides, but end by railing on trump. You say that the reason for failure doesn't matter, but provide a list of reasons. You claim that health insurance is the cause of no testing, when the article stated that the CDC refused to conduct or approve testing. If you sentiment is that this is not the time to focus on partisanship, I wholeheartedly agree. If you sentiment is we should be solution minded, I wholeheartedly agree. The focus should be on determining what we can do NOW to save the most lives. There will be plenty of time later to assign blame and discuss long term fixes.
- blattimwind 7y ago
  Seeing global medical emergencies as a bipartisan battle for political capital has to be rooted in a truly fascinating world view.
josephorjoe 7y ago
I guess we'll find out how susceptible viruses are to propaganda, political spin, and troll farms...
- bilekas 7y ago
  Will it matter ? There will just be a barrage of BS about how the numbers are fake news, and how the media is being dramatic. We've seen this all before and it's become so predictable.
  - josephorjoe 7y ago
    I predict the virus will persist in being unmoved by public opinion no matter how fake the news is. With less confidence, I predict people who get sick, have friends and family get sick, and/or watch their 401k value drop 25% in a month will develop antibodies to certain types of fake news.
    - Loughla 7y ago
      >With less confidence, I predict people who get sick, have friends and family get sick, and/or watch their 401k value drop 25% in a month will develop antibodies to certain types of fake news. With 100% confidence, I predict those people will use all of the things you mention there to further increase the political divide and entrench their already solidified world and political views.
      - magduf 7y ago
        Probably, but eventually something is going to break because reality doesn't care about peoples' political views or worldviews.
        Loughla 7y ago
        I honestly think you're underestimating just how stubborn and short-sighted people are/can be.
dragonwriter 7y ago
In addition to the CDC, the National Security Council position addressing global pandemic preparation and response was cut. Not to mention the whole of the national policy and especially the national security and foreign relations apparatus being the subject of multiple rounds of political, vanity-driven purges that have driven out expertise in favor of toadying.
- magduf 7y ago
  I don't really see the problem here. If the government has cut all the staff needed to respond effectively to a pandemic threat, causing the pandemic to be far, far worse than it would have been otherwise, this is just a case of the voting public getting exactly what they voted for. As a wise Frenchman once wrote, "every nation gets the government it deserves". This should be a lesson to voters in every democratic country about the dangers of electing incompetents to run your nation's government.
  - lutorm 7y ago
    this is just a case of the voting public getting exactly what they voted for Except that the majority of them didn't, of course...
    - magduf 7y ago
      Roughly half the country absolutely did vote for this President. Moreover, while the Electoral College system does give an edge to certain places, no one has ever made it a political issue to get this changed, so that means the majority is OK with the system remaining as-is. They've had well over 200 years to change it now...
      - dragonwriter 7y ago
        > Roughly half the country absolutely did vote for this I get that approximation is subjective, but I'm not sure 19% is what most (or even “roughly half”, even by your apparent standard, of) people would consider “roughly half”.
gdubs 7y ago
There was a fairly in depth FP article back in January about cuts to the pandemic response budget, as well as the elimination of the pandemic czar / team that was created in response to the last Ebola outbreak: https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/01/31/coronavirus-china-trump-united-states-public-health-emergency-response/ https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/01/31/coronavirus-china-trump...
randomfool 7y ago
> STEIN: You’ve consistently called for enormous cuts to the CDC… Does this experience at all give you pause? > TRUMP: No…I’m a business person, I don’t like having thousands of people around when you don’t need them…we can get ‘em back really quickly. https://twitter.com/ddiamond/status/1232829064194469893 https://twitter.com/ddiamond/status/1232829064194469893 This is not the correct approach for an organization responsible for early warnings and preparation.
- api 7y ago
  Imagine the outcry if he applied that logic to the military. Just shut down the DOD. We can always raise a citizens' militia if anything bad happens.
  - nostrademons 7y ago
    This may not be all that inaccurate now: https://federalnewsnetwork.com/navy/2020/01/for-new-navy-chief-fixing-readiness-problems-trumps-building-bigger-fleet/ https://federalnewsnetwork.com/navy/2020/01/for-new-navy-chi...
  - three_seagrass 7y ago
    Is this satire? I think the DOD is overfunded too but there isn't much that citizens from the local shooting range can do against a drone missile.
    - hanniabu 7y ago
      That's the point. Trump is acting like he's running a hotel where the cleaning crew, janitors, concierge, etc are all easy to fill positions and easy to onboard, whereas getting qualified people for the CDC/military and onboarding them is not at all a simple task.
    - Slartie 7y ago
      That's the point. Just cutting down the military when you don't need it and scaling it back up "really quickly" when it's needed obviously does not work, just as it does not work to cut down the CDC and scale it back up "really quickly" when there's a pandemic incoming. Both institutions provide a significant part of their value by "standing by", so qualified personnel can spring into action quickly in case they are needed. It's just that Trump obviously applies double standards here: while the military is fine to burn through billions without supplying immediate value (outside of that provided by its mere existence) for a large part of that money, the CDC as a civil organization is apparently not allowed do to the very same thing, even when it costs much less money in comparison. And that's what api obviously wanted to point out. I can't see too much satire in that.
makomk 7y ago
Apparently, that's partisan misinformation: https://apnews.com/d36d6c4de29f4d04beda3db00cb46104 https://apnews.com/d36d6c4de29f4d04beda3db00cb46104
- beepboopbeep 7y ago
  https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/trump-cuts-national-security-staff-may-hurt-coronavirus-response-say-n1143656 https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/trump-cuts-nation...
- robocat 7y ago
  "In 2018, the Trump administration fired the government’s entire pandemic response chain of command, including the White House management infrastructure." isn't covered by your response...
- Spellman 7y ago
  As I mention elsewhere, both can be true. The CDC itself isn't majorly affected and day-to-day operations can continue as normal following the standard playbook. Especially at the local and state level. However, the Federal pandemic response teams have been gutted, positions not filled, and so we don't have the leadership to coordinate a nationwide response as new facts are discovered by the Executive Branch.

bluGill 7y ago

It is an election year. One says says Trump cut needless dead weight and there is still plenty of staff. The other side is going to play this crisis and call it a gutting.

aaomidi 7y ago
Are you seriously arguing the cuts to CDCs budget is not needless? Stop making politics a spectator sport. There's lives on the fucking line.
- FillardMillmore 7y ago
  Can Congress vote to provide emergency funding to the CDC to make up for the cuts?
  - bilekas 7y ago
    Not to go too off topic and political but could you see any republicans going up in direct contrast to Trump saying : 'all is under control' ? I certainly cant. And as shameful and sad as it sounds, until people start dying.. I don't see much movement on this.
    - gnulinux 7y ago
      It's going to be very late once people start dying. COVID-19 takes about 2 weeks to develop severe pneumonia. Once dozens of people start dying, assuming 1% fatality, there would be thousands of patients 2 weeks ago, spreading exponentially.
  - Ididntdothis 7y ago
    You can’t just spin up this capability quickly once it has been lost. There is lot of experience needed
  - davidw 7y ago
    Maybe, but it's probably not like, say, ditch digging, where you round up some people with strong backs and hand them shovels and get to work. Probably takes time to ramp up. The time to do that was a few months back.
  - acdha 7y ago
    Put this in a more familiar context: say the CDC had just been rooted by a bunch of hackers. How much time would it take for Congress to cut a check versus setting up the organization structure, hiring highly-skilled in-demand people, getting them on-board and trained up with the environment, and letting them learn enough about the systems to start hardening them, etc.? This kind of capacity takes years to develop even if you can cut it quickly.
  - dragonwriter 7y ago
    No, for reasons very similar to those which The Mythical Man-Month explains often prevent throwing more resources at a late software project.
    - FillardMillmore 7y ago
      Thanks for all the responses everyone - I understood this concept but failed to apply it here (where it most certainly does apply). Dont know if anyone is still keeping tabs on this thread, but apparently Trump's "CDC budget cuts" are a falsehood. He proposed cuts but was overruled by congress. In fact, CDC received an increase in funding. See the following link: https://apnews.com/49de80242dd8b58bd34af7cb19f1323a https://apnews.com/49de80242dd8b58bd34af7cb19f1323a > MIKE BLOOMBERG: “There’s nobody here to figure out what the hell we should be doing. And he’s defunded — he’s defunded Centers for Disease Control, CDC, so we don’t have the organization we need. This is a very serious thing.” — Democratic presidential debate Tuesday. JOE BIDEN, comparing the Obama-Biden administration with now: “We increased the budget of the CDC. We increased the NIH budget. ... He’s wiped all that out. ... He cut the funding for the entire effort.” THE FACTS: They’re both wrong to say the agencies have seen their money cut. Bloomberg is repeating the false allegation in a new ad that states the U.S. is unprepared for the virus because of “reckless cuts” to the CDC. Trump’s budgets have proposed cuts to public health, only to be overruled by Congress, where there’s strong bipartisan support for agencies such as the CDC and NIH. Instead, financing has increased.
- ralusek 7y ago
  I don't understand this argument, what if the CDC was actually overstaffed? Do you know? I have no idea... Lives are always on the line when it comes to disease, but we have never placed an infinite value on human life. By your logic and morality, the CDC should receive additional funding and staffing until there are 0 deaths from disease every year, regardless of diminishing returns. What if increasing funding and staffing of the CDC by 100x reduced the incidence of flu-related deaths by 10%, would your justification mandate this? To call the cuts "needless" and justify it by arguing that "there are lives on the line" is simply not a good argument unless you are willing to take the argument to its extreme conclusion. If instead what you are arguing is that you believe that the previous budget and staffing was at a correct figure, and that you believe that the increase in body count that will come as a result of the adjustment of that figure (which I doubt is knowable at this moment at time, or if it is even greater than 0) is not a worthwhile tradeoff, then that is a completely different argument.
  - Loughla 7y ago
    Your entire premise is based on a basic logical fallacy. You absolutely do not have to take the argument to its extreme, and that is literally called an appeal to extremes. The argument made was that cutting the CDC, and leadership related to global pandemics was probably a bad idea now that we may be experiencing one. Not that we should spend all of our money on the CDC regardless of returns.
    - ralusek 7y ago
      But that's precisely my point. I'm not saying that you or the OP is actually arguing the extreme of the position, I'm saying that the argument that "cutting the budget is needless" because "lives are on the line" implies the extreme unless you are willing to accept that there is a correct amount of diminishing returns where we would agree that cuts to the budget were not needless, but justifiable, regardless of lives being on the line. So if we accept that we both agree that there is a figure where this tradeoff takes place, then what I'd like to know is why the previous figure was correct, and the figure post-cuts is not.
bilekas 7y ago
>The other side is going to play this crisis I would prefer to have more people looking into this than less.. The idea of err on the side of caution really does apply right now.
- bluGill 7y ago
  Is there any reason to believe the people Trump fired are useful to look into this, or are they just "middle management" overhead that would get in the way? I haven't looked into the details. So far this entire thread has made me conclude nobody else has either - instead they are spinning it into good/bad trump while pretending to be neutral.
jethro_tell 7y ago
There's no sides here, and the particular reason for failure doesn't matter. This is a disease that will kill people. Letting people go untested out into the wild is not going to help. People fuck up, that's what people do, leaders catch and acknowledge failure early and try to fix it. Unfortunately, at this point, people will die that didn't have to. And that's going to be because: 1. Tons of people weren't tested that should have been. 2. People can't afford to get a test because of the health insurance situation in this country. Aggressive no cost testing would help, I'm sure trump is going to announce that here any minute for a problem that he doesn't think is real.
- onceUponADime 7y ago
  Dont forget the problem of declaring people ilegal and pushing other population groups (drug addicts) with draconian measures into the underground, where they infect one another in horrible conditions, and make any quarantine impossible. If any measure should be take, then for the time of the epidemic, the ICE and similar agencys - should be frozzen or recommendered to the CDC, and a general amnesty for any illegal health related problem announced.Im certain that seems insane to some conservatives, but the other approach is self-sabotage on a titanic level.
  - jethro_tell 7y ago
    This is true for sure. This virus will be hiding in the corners of society for a while and will keep popping up for a bit.
- s1artibartfast 7y ago
  I find your post really interesting and am having trouble unpacking it. It seems to me that there are many contradictions, but perhaps I missunderstood. You say that there are no sides, but end by railing on trump. You say that the reason for failure doesn't matter, but provide a list of reasons. You claim that health insurance is the cause of no testing, when the article stated that the CDC refused to conduct or approve testing. If you sentiment is that this is not the time to focus on partisanship, I wholeheartedly agree. If you sentiment is we should be solution minded, I wholeheartedly agree. The focus should be on determining what we can do NOW to save the most lives. There will be plenty of time later to assign blame and discuss long term fixes.
blattimwind 7y ago
Seeing global medical emergencies as a bipartisan battle for political capital has to be rooted in a truly fascinating world view.

josephorjoe 7y ago

I guess we'll find out how susceptible viruses are to propaganda, political spin, and troll farms...

bilekas 7y ago
Will it matter ? There will just be a barrage of BS about how the numbers are fake news, and how the media is being dramatic. We've seen this all before and it's become so predictable.
- josephorjoe 7y ago
  I predict the virus will persist in being unmoved by public opinion no matter how fake the news is. With less confidence, I predict people who get sick, have friends and family get sick, and/or watch their 401k value drop 25% in a month will develop antibodies to certain types of fake news.
  - Loughla 7y ago
    >With less confidence, I predict people who get sick, have friends and family get sick, and/or watch their 401k value drop 25% in a month will develop antibodies to certain types of fake news. With 100% confidence, I predict those people will use all of the things you mention there to further increase the political divide and entrench their already solidified world and political views.
    - magduf 7y ago
      Probably, but eventually something is going to break because reality doesn't care about peoples' political views or worldviews.
      - Loughla 7y ago
        I honestly think you're underestimating just how stubborn and short-sighted people are/can be.

dragonwriter 7y ago

In addition to the CDC, the National Security Council position addressing global pandemic preparation and response was cut. Not to mention the whole of the national policy and especially the national security and foreign relations apparatus being the subject of multiple rounds of political, vanity-driven purges that have driven out expertise in favor of toadying.

magduf 7y ago
I don't really see the problem here. If the government has cut all the staff needed to respond effectively to a pandemic threat, causing the pandemic to be far, far worse than it would have been otherwise, this is just a case of the voting public getting exactly what they voted for. As a wise Frenchman once wrote, "every nation gets the government it deserves". This should be a lesson to voters in every democratic country about the dangers of electing incompetents to run your nation's government.
- lutorm 7y ago
  this is just a case of the voting public getting exactly what they voted for Except that the majority of them didn't, of course...
  - magduf 7y ago
    Roughly half the country absolutely did vote for this President. Moreover, while the Electoral College system does give an edge to certain places, no one has ever made it a political issue to get this changed, so that means the majority is OK with the system remaining as-is. They've had well over 200 years to change it now...
    - dragonwriter 7y ago
      > Roughly half the country absolutely did vote for this I get that approximation is subjective, but I'm not sure 19% is what most (or even “roughly half”, even by your apparent standard, of) people would consider “roughly half”.

gdubs 7y ago

There was a fairly in depth FP article back in January about cuts to the pandemic response budget, as well as the elimination of the pandemic czar / team that was created in response to the last Ebola outbreak: https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/01/31/coronavirus-china-trump-united-states-public-health-emergency-response/ https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/01/31/coronavirus-china-trump...

randomfool 7y ago

> STEIN: You’ve consistently called for enormous cuts to the CDC… Does this experience at all give you pause? > TRUMP: No…I’m a business person, I don’t like having thousands of people around when you don’t need them…we can get ‘em back really quickly. https://twitter.com/ddiamond/status/1232829064194469893 https://twitter.com/ddiamond/status/1232829064194469893 This is not the correct approach for an organization responsible for early warnings and preparation.

api 7y ago
Imagine the outcry if he applied that logic to the military. Just shut down the DOD. We can always raise a citizens' militia if anything bad happens.
- nostrademons 7y ago
  This may not be all that inaccurate now: https://federalnewsnetwork.com/navy/2020/01/for-new-navy-chief-fixing-readiness-problems-trumps-building-bigger-fleet/ https://federalnewsnetwork.com/navy/2020/01/for-new-navy-chi...
- three_seagrass 7y ago
  Is this satire? I think the DOD is overfunded too but there isn't much that citizens from the local shooting range can do against a drone missile.
  - hanniabu 7y ago
    That's the point. Trump is acting like he's running a hotel where the cleaning crew, janitors, concierge, etc are all easy to fill positions and easy to onboard, whereas getting qualified people for the CDC/military and onboarding them is not at all a simple task.
  - Slartie 7y ago
    That's the point. Just cutting down the military when you don't need it and scaling it back up "really quickly" when it's needed obviously does not work, just as it does not work to cut down the CDC and scale it back up "really quickly" when there's a pandemic incoming. Both institutions provide a significant part of their value by "standing by", so qualified personnel can spring into action quickly in case they are needed. It's just that Trump obviously applies double standards here: while the military is fine to burn through billions without supplying immediate value (outside of that provided by its mere existence) for a large part of that money, the CDC as a civil organization is apparently not allowed do to the very same thing, even when it costs much less money in comparison. And that's what api obviously wanted to point out. I can't see too much satire in that.

makomk 7y ago

Apparently, that's partisan misinformation: https://apnews.com/d36d6c4de29f4d04beda3db00cb46104 https://apnews.com/d36d6c4de29f4d04beda3db00cb46104

beepboopbeep 7y ago
https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/trump-cuts-national-security-staff-may-hurt-coronavirus-response-say-n1143656 https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/trump-cuts-nation...
robocat 7y ago
"In 2018, the Trump administration fired the government’s entire pandemic response chain of command, including the White House management infrastructure." isn't covered by your response...
Spellman 7y ago
As I mention elsewhere, both can be true. The CDC itself isn't majorly affected and day-to-day operations can continue as normal following the standard playbook. Especially at the local and state level. However, the Federal pandemic response teams have been gutted, positions not filled, and so we don't have the leadership to coordinate a nationwide response as new facts are discovered by the Executive Branch.