Trump spent the past 2 years slashing the government agencies responsible for handling the - Coronavirus outbreak. sm Posted: Mar 5th, 2020 - 8:16 am
"In 2018, for instance, the CDC cut 80% of its efforts to prevent global disease outbreaks because it was running out of money. Ultimately, the department went from working in 49 countries to just 10.
Here are some other actions the Trump administration undertook to dismantle government-spending programs related to fighting the spread of global diseases, according to Foreign Policy:
- Shutting down the entire global-health-security unit of the National Security Council.
- Eliminating the US government's $30 million Complex Crises Fund.
- Reducing national health spending by $15 billion.
- Consistently attacking Mark Green, the director of the US Agency for International Development.
The CDC is working on a new test to screen for the coronavirus, but according to New York magazine, problems with the test's development resulted in only three out of 100 public-health labs being equipped to screen for the virus. Moreover, each test costs as much as $250, and the Health and Human Services Department is already running out of money to finance an adequate response to the outbreak.
The Trump administration recently requested $2.5 billion in emergency funds — $1.25 billion in new funding and $1.25 billion to be diverted from other federal programs — to aid in preparing and responding to coronavirus cases in the US.
But Democratic lawmakers and health experts skewered the administration for not going far enough to combat the crisis.
The economic consequences of an unaddressed outbreak would dwarf US spending on efforts to control it, Marc Lipsitch, an epidemiologist and the director of the Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, told Insider.
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