back

by TMWNN·6y ago·view on hn ↗
>Get out of here with this. We had expert teams and processes in place to combat the possibility of this exact thing and his administration fired them without any replacement.

Ah yes, yet another person who looked at the Snopes piece's headline and nothing else. One would think reading only that, or the Twitter thread (!) the piece is based on, that to save money (or because the Trump administration hates science, or something) the entire "US Pandemic Response Team" agency was eliminated and everyone in a large DC office building was fired.

Actually reading the contemporary NBC News https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/tom-bossert-t... and Washington Post https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-health/wp/2018/0... articles the Snopes piece cites in the body, they seem to have been a handful of people in one team in the National Security Council hierarchy, that the new National Security Advisor reassigned to related agencies, as part of a desire to have his own hierarchical structure. Ziemer resigned because he wanted to keep his team the way it was.

COVID19 was not a surprise; that is, it was known to exist in China some time before the first cases appeared in the US. It is not unreasonable for a government to assemble a team to respond to something like a pandemic as needed, as opposed to having people dedicated solely to the purpose and nothing else. And that's exactly what the US did, implementing the ban on non-American travelers who'd been to China in late January, among other things.

You may or may not agree with this. But please don't claim that this is somehow prima facie proof of the Trump administration's malfeasance/evilness.

PS - No, Trump did not "cut the CDC budget" either. https://apnews.com/d36d6c4de29f4d04beda3db00cb46104

1 comments
No, Trump did not "cut the CDC budget" either.

No, he only proposed cutting the CDC budget. Luckily, saner minds prevailed.

>No, he only proposed cutting the CDC budget. Luckily, saner minds prevailed.

Presidents do not pass the budget; Congress does, under the Constitution. The annual President-proposed budget is just that, a starting point from which to negotiate from. Both the House (currently controlled by Democrats) and Senate (Republicans) have to pass it.

If you criticize the president for starting out with a proposal for cutting the CDC budget (and for most other agencies), why not also praise him for signing the final budget that raised its budget?

I don’t find anything praiseworthy in his actions re this crisis, he has and will continue to handle it really badly IMO.