Democrats, facing the loss of their U.S. Senate majority and perhaps up to 20 seats in the House, think they’ve found a new secret weapon: Blame Republicans for Ebola.
The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee got into the act Monday with a static ad blaming Republicans for voting for a 2011 spending bill that failed to increase funds for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) by as much as Democrats wanted. An obscure progressive group, the Agenda Project, has gone much further, releasing a ludicrous 60-second ad the group claims will run in two states, explicitly blaming Republicans for Ebola. The ad mixes together clips of Republicans saying variations of the word “cut” with scenes from the Ebola outbreak, and ends with the ominous message: “Republican cuts kill.”
Liberals feel emboldened by comments from NIH director Francis Collins, who told Huffington Post’s Sam Stein that “if we had not gone through our ten-year slide in research support, we probably would have had a vaccine in time for this that would’ve gone through clinical trials and would have been ready.”
But neither CDC nor NIH has been starving for cash. Not only did CDC’s overall budget increase in fiscal 2014 (by about 5 percent), but so did such individual items as immunization and respiratory diseases (up $66 million for 2014), public health preparedness and response (up $103 million or 8 percent), and emerging infectious diseases (up $49 million or 14 percent). NIH, even without taking into account its short-term boost in funding from the 2009 economic stimulus package, currently has an inflation-adjusted budget of around $30 billion, roughly 50 percent higher than what it had in 1994. It gets more money today (again, accounting for inflation) than at any time during the Clinton era.
Likewise, the State Department’s Global Health Program — an agency intended for situations precisely like the one in West Africa now — received a $300 million boost for fiscal 2014.
Nor is it correct to assume that these agencies use money well when they get it. CDC, for example, received $3 billion from a newly created Obamacare fund in the last five years, yet used only 6 percent of it for programs related to fighting communicable diseases. The agency spent three times as much on a program that subsidizes bike lanes and farmers’ markets, which as Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal observed this week “would do little to combat dangerous diseases like Ebola, SARS or anthrax.”
And NIH has funded studies that are either trivial or wholly unrelated to Americans’ well-being. For example, it spent $550,000 on a study that concluded that heavy drinking in one’s 30s is perceived as a sign of immaturity; $700,000 to discover that Vietnamese children are more likely to be physically inactive if they have no recess at school and no place to play; and $667,000 for a study that concluded that watching reruns of old sitcoms makes people feel good.
Voters can hold Democrats accountable for their ludicrous claims, but the bureaucrats should know better than to use this crisis as a moment for self-pity. They have the resources they need — let’s see them use those resources properly for once.
