If we didn’t know it already, the coronavirus pandemic has revealed how ineffective and wasteful bureaucratic governance can be.
Let’s start with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The CDC was established in 1942 in response to a malaria outbreak in the Southeastern U.S. It was known then as the Office of Malaria Control in War Areas, but its purpose was the same: It was created to study and prevent the spread of viruses and other communicable diseases.
But, over the past few decades, the CDC has expanded its focus to other unrelated subjects, such as childhood obesity and the prevention of gun violence. Its original mission became obscure and was often neglected. Add that to the CDC’s ever-growing list of regulations for the private sector, and we’re left with a paragon of bureaucratic inefficiency and incompetence.
The CDC’s response to the coronavirus is proof that this inefficiency is not without consequences. Yes, China’s communist regime and its World Health Organization lackeys deserve most of the blame for our relative unpreparedness in February — China actively hid the virus from the world, and the WHO ignored warnings that a highly contagious disease was on the move. But our own bureaucracies were supposed to make testing available and prepare our healthcare system for the coming shock.
The CDC’s testing kit, released in early February, didn’t work. And, when private labs and scientists attempted to create an alternative, they were prevented by burdensome bureaucratic regulations enforced by the Food and Drug Administration.
“We have the skills and resources as a community but we are collectively paralyzed by a bloated bureaucratic/administrative process,” Marc Couturier, medical director at academic laboratory ARUP in Utah, wrote to other microbiologists on Feb. 27, according to the Washington Post.
By the time the federal government relaxed its regulations preventing private laboratories from rolling out their own tests, the coronavirus had already made its way to New York City, Los Angeles, and Washington state. And even then, the reduced regulations came with a catch: a new regulatory hurdle requiring private labs to receive an “emergency use authorization.”
Critics of the Trump administration have blamed our lack of testing on the president, claiming that this had to do with proposed budget cuts to the CDC. This is simply false. Congress denied Trump’s proposed cuts every single year, resulting in a gradual year-over-year increase in the CDC’s budget. You can claim that Trump tried to do the wrong thing, but his intentions, never instantiated, did not spread the virus.
Besides, the problem was never the CDC’s lack of funding; it was with CDC policy. The agency has been spending millions of dollars on projects that have nothing to do with virology or communicable diseases. In 2014, for example, the CDC spent at least $1.7 million on a Hollywood liaison to make sure TV shows accurately portrayed medical procedures, which sounds a lot like something for which Hollywood should be hiring its own consultants and paying. And, in 2017, the agency spent more than $215 million on “environmental health.”
Meanwhile, the digital system the CDC uses to track data is so outdated that Dr. Deborah Birx, a member of Trump’s coronavirus task force, reportedly told another member of the administration that she can no longer “trust” it.
This problem isn’t exclusive to the CDC, either. The National Institutes of Health also has a habit of prioritizing pet projects, like when it spent $1 million back in 2014 on a study regarding sexual activities of fruit flies and $350,000 on a study into the importance of imagination while golfing. And all the while, the nation’s stockpile of N95 masks sat depleted.
In short, those funds could have gone toward preparing the U.S. for the very sort of outbreak these agencies were created to prevent. Our response to COVID-19 should have been streamlined and comprehensive. It was not, thanks to the administrative complexity of bureaucratic governance.
