You literally claimed that SawMaster's remark that the Trump administration
"dismantled the planning mechanism for pandemics back in 2018" was "fake news" yet when
presented with an article by
Beth Cameron, the person formerly in charge of the White House’s National Security Council Directorate for Global Health Security and Biodefense explaining how it had been shut down by Trump you are trying to make a case that it never happened. The Trump administration not only shut down the Directorate for Global Health Security and Biodefense but they
fired ALL the people with exactly the required expertise who ran it. Those were the people whose job is was to keep an eye on developments like this! Nobody at the NCS after that was watching the store. Nobody took any appropriate actions to deal with whay was unfolding in China. In the meantime Trumps first words about the corona virus were to call it a "Democratic Hoax" at a campaign rally and later to claim that "like a 'miracle' it will just go away.
So, again, it wasn't a cut. Trump literally dismantled National Security Council Directorate for Global Health Security and Biodefense and fired everyone.
As for cutting the CDC budget, Trump is widely known to have done so and he even is on record attempting to defend the cuts.
Trump defends huge cuts to the CDC's budget by saying the government can hire more doctors 'when we need them' during crises
I'll start with the article you cited. There's a ton of opinion in there and very little proof. I prefer facts to opinions. I've already shown that the CDC budget was not cut. So, any claims to the contrary are incorrect, according to the CDC themselves. For example, "In its latest budget proposal, the Trump administration sought to cut CDC funding by 16%" Scary statement, where are the links to the actual information? What was the dollar proposal compared to the previous year's budget.
The 2016 CDC budget was $11,519,000,000.
https://www.hhs.gov/about/budget/budget-in-brief/cdc/index.html#overview
The 2019 CDC budget was $11,095,621,000
https://www.cdc.gov/budget/documents/fy2019/fy-2019-detail-table.pdf
But, as I pointed out earlier, $1,104,519,000 in program funds and their associated costs were moved to other agencies (NIH and the Public Health and Social Services Emergency Fund.) So, the real budget for activities that CDC is responsible for
increased by more than $1 billion.
The 2020 proposed CDC budget is $11,954,000,000
https://www.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/fy-2020-budget-in-brief.pdf
Even if you take the raw numbers and ignore programs that have been moved to other agencies, the "cut" in the CDC budget is 1.3% using the HHS numbers for 2020. That's a
long distance from 16% as the article claims and certainly not "huge" as it claims. And we all know that proposed budgets are not real budgets. Those are passed by Congress.
As for Beth Cameron's claim, it is the opinion of one person with a vested interest in making Trump look bad. If you look at the article, which I linked to, even she admits it's not really true. "It's impossible to assess the impact of the 2018 decision to disband the unit, she said."
“It's unclear whether the decision to disband the directorate, which was made in May 2018, after John Bolton became national security adviser, was a tactical move to downgrade the issue or whether it was part of the White House's interest in simplifying and shrinking the National Security Council staff," Cameron says.
So, if it's impossible to assess the impact AND it's unclear what the reason for it was, how then does she conclude that 'it's clear that eliminating the office contributed to what she called a “sluggish domestic response.”'
I've already shown you with the timeline that the response was not sluggish. In fact, Trump was criticized, at first, for moving too aggressively. So, her statements in the article are nothing more than her opinion and have no basis in factual evidence. They are simply an appeal to authority from the article's author to fool the gullible.
Finally, I was not "trying to make a case that it never happened." As I cited in my response quoting the article, "A senior administration official said Friday that the NSC's global health security directorate was absorbed into another division where similar responsibilities still exist, but under different titles. The work of coordinating policy and making sure that decisions made by Trump's coronavirus task force are implemented is still the job of the NSC."
I never said the office wasn't closed, as you are claiming. I said the responsibilities the office had were not eliminated. They were retasked to other offices in the NSC.
Let's at least try to be accurate in our claims.
