In the wake of the Coronavirus that is currently wreaking havoc around the world and raining Hell on America, reports swirled that Donald Trump may have very well screwed this nation over in regard to our ability to ward off the life-threatening virus — and it all boils down for his deep-seated disdain for Barack Obama.
As the virus continues to spread through the United States, taking thousands of lives in its wake, a recent report from Foreign Policy now leads us to believe that the United States may very well be as underprepared for a situation like this as it has ever been, thanks to Trump’s childish obsession with ridding his administration of anything that has anything to do with his predecessor — including Obama’s pandemic response team.
Back in 2014, when Ebola was running rampant, Obama realized that the response to pandemics such as these left a lot to be desired. As a result of his discovery, Trump’s forerunner appointed a White House “epidemic czar,” who clearly laid out rules, roles, and budgets for various agencies, and dispatched “incident commanders” to each Ebola-hit country as well as the United States.
In building upon his response actions to the Ebola pandemic, Obama implemented permanent epidemic monitoring and command groups within the NSC as well as the DHS, both of which operated on the scientific and public health leads of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and CDC as well as diplomatic advice from the State Department.
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However, Trump threw that all down the toilet the moment he was able to, almost assuredly for no other reason than it was attached to his predecessor’s legacy.
In the spring of 2018, Trump tried and failed to do away with $252 million in funding designated to the rebuilding of Ebola-stricken countries — only pulling back on the effort after receiving a boatload of backlash from both sides of the political aisle. However, Donald was still successful in cutting $15 billion from national health spending as well as the global disease-fighting operational budgets of the CDC, NSC, DHS, and HHS. The government’s $30 million Complex Crises Fund was done away with, as well.
Trump went on to order the dissolution of the entire global health security unit. To date, neither the NSC nor DHS epidemic teams have been rebuilt or reinstated.
The CDC’s global health section has been so drastically reduced that the majority of its staff members have been laid off and they’ve gone from working within 49 countries to just 10 while Trump continues to fight back against Congress in an effort to reduce funding to the U.S. Public Health Service Commissioned Corps by a staggering 40 percent.
Now this nation is head to head with a massive, deadly pandemic, and the only force we have to fight against it is a sloppily put together “President’s Coronavirus Task Force.”
And it’s all because he’s mad at Obama for being better than him.
You can read the full report here.
Featured image via Political Tribune gallery
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