An ad by the liberal Agenda Project claims the nation’s readiness to combat Ebola was severely compromised by cuts Republicans made to the CDC and NIH budgets in 2011. The ad overlooks an inconvenient truth — namely, that the budget, which passed the House passed the bill on Feb. 19, 2011, never passed the Senate.
The ad also fails to mention that the GOP was not alone in its desire to trim fat from these bloated bureaucracies. Barack Obama, in his own budget plan for fiscal year 2012, proposed cutting funding for the CDC’s public health emergency preparedness program to the tune of 72 million. His budget came out the same week as the Republicans’. His didn’t make it as far as the House.
The point nevertheless is that the administration was guilty of precisely the same “malfeasance” the liberal PAC is accusing GOP leaders of. In fact, Obama is guiltier since his cuts specifically target the Public Health Emergency Preparedness Grant Program.
As for expenditures by the CDC and NIH, not all are earmarked to the fighting of scourges like Ebola. This past year, the NIH spent taxpayer money studying why lesbians tend to be fat. For its part, the CDC conducted a survey on what bus riders thought of HIV videos.
