Trump's staff cuts have undermined Covid-19 containment efforts, watchdog finds

The Trump administration badly undermined the effort to contain the coronavirus outbreak by getting rid of most staff tasked with identifying global health problems in China while repeatedly attempting to slash funding for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), according to a new report by an environmental watchdog.

Over the past three years, the Trump administration has drastically reduced a team working in China to identify global health threats like Covid-19, which originated in the Chinese city of Wuhan late last year. The initiative’s 11 CDC staffers have been cut to three people, while 39 workers classed as “local employees” have been reduced to 11 people.

The administration disbanded the national security council’s directorate charged with global health and has sought to go further still, requesting budget cuts from the CDC of up to 20% for each of the past three years, only to be rebuffed by Congress. Trump’s effort to dismantle the Affordable Care Act would also have reduced the CDC’s funding by around 8% a year.

The CDC has still undergone an “erosion of budget and staff under Trump” but without Congress’s defiance “thousands more Americans would likely die over the next few months because of even more reduced capacity at the CDC”, according to the report, compiled by the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative (EDGI).

“If we cannot draw lessons here for our future, then the risks Americans face both from emerging and chronic diseases will become truly incalculable,” the report warns.

The report, which draws upon publicly available federal government records, highlights a lengthy list of actions by the Trump administration that has risked turning the spread of the coronavirus into an even greater disaster.

The administration has proposed a 20% cut to the CDC’s emerging and zoonotic diseases program, which investigates and prevents new diseases. It has also attempted to reduce funding to help countries in Africa still suffering from the Ebola epidemic, overseen the loss of 61 staff from the CDC’s disease prevention program and proposed deep cuts to the CDC’s environmental health work.

Christopher Sellers, an expert in the environment and health at Stony Brook University and a lead author of the report, said the Trump administration’s actions slowed down the response to the virus and probably affected the preparedness of hospitals and various government agencies to the crisis.

“The administration has repeatedly and systematically corroded critical parts of the CDC,” Sellers said. “This was just begging for an epidemic to hit us. It was a perfect storm of lack of preparation.”

Sellers added: “It’s kind of incredible they are now trying to rewrite history to say we have plenty of resources when they’ve systematically targeted them. They should be held responsible by the American people as it is outrageous.”

Donald Trump initially reacted to the onward march of coronavirus by calling it a “hoax” before then, also inaccurately, claiming that the US had completely contained the disease.

The president has since declared a national state of emergency but the federal response has been dogged by a severe lack of testing, a dearth of crucial medical supplies such as ventilators and false and misleading statements by Trump over the need to avoid large gatherings of people.

On Sunday, the president was asked in a press conference about the administration’s cuts to the CDC, in particular the removal of an epidemiologist embedded within China’s own CDC equivalent.

Trump said: “We actually gave CDC more money, not less money. They said we defunded. It turned out it was more money. Every one of those things that were said were 100% wrong, and this sounds like another one them.”

Trump then sought to blame China for the crisis. “I wish they told us three months sooner that this was a problem,” the president said about a disease that emerged in December and was then reported by China to the World Health Organization in January. “We didn’t know about it.”