House Funding Bill Lacks Common Sense

In his autobiography, former CIA Director George Tenet said, "We are first and foremost a nation of laws and if we are to continue to lead the world, we must face difficult issues head-on with honesty, decency, and common sense.” This quote resonates with me more today than when I first read it years ago, especially considering the current state of affairs in Washington, DC.

There have always been individuals in Congress who seem to think they're B-list celebrities, freely voicing whatever comes to mind. That's nothing new and is unlikely to change. However, what has evolved is the institution of Congress as a whole, particularly the House of Representatives. The virtues of honesty, decency, and common sense, as espoused by George Tenet, seem to be in short supply. The recent release of the House Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education Appropriations Bill, which passed out of subcommittee on a party-line vote, is a case in point.

Let's talk about honesty, which means being truthful. In the summary that House Republicans released along with the bill, they state that the bill, “Reduces funding for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) by $1.6 billion (18%)” and then immediately follow up with, “Continues support for core public health programs.” As a Republican who has worked in Congress, the US Department of Health and Human Services, and as the Chief of Staff at the CDC, I'm well aware that there is wasteful spending in the federal government, and we should focus on cutting that. But let's discuss what was cut from the CDC in this bill:

• A $250 million cut from the Public Health Infrastructure and Capacity funding line. This is money to states to help them be better prepared for future health threats.
• A $100 million cut from the CDC’s Public Health Data Modernization initiative. Better data means a better response to future outbreaks. Most of this money again goes to states to help them build the infrastructure they need to support themselves.
• A $322 million cut to the Global Health program. I have personally sat in meetings with US ambassadors in Africa and Asia who said the CDC was the diplomatic front door for the USA. This cut will harm our standing with our allies overseas.
• Completely cuts the Center for Forecasting and Outbreak Analytics (CFA) to ZERO. The CFA was created in the wake of COVID-19 to be the National Weather Service for outbreaks and was a huge bipartisan success when created just a few years ago. Now it is gutted.
• A cut of $220 million to President Trump’s Ending HIV Epidemic initiative. This was a program announced in President Trump’s 2019 State of the Union Address. House Republicans, who have shown unwavering support for the former president through impeachments and indictments, now want to cut his only successful health related program to the bone.

Decency, meaning behavior that conforms to accepted standards of morality or respectability, is another virtue in question. In 2021, there were a total of 48,830 firearm deaths, an increase of 3,608 or 8% from 2020. Every time I drop my son off at school, I shudder. Will today be the day that I get the call that many other parents have received recently? “Your child was involved in a school shooting.” This bill eliminates the CDC’s Firearm Injury and Mortality Prevention Research funding line. Why are we scared to admit that we have a problem with firearms in this country? We should be able to respectfully say that as a country we will not ban firearms, but we are going to support simple research to better understand the causes of gun violence and how simple things like safe storage of firearms can save lives. We should not be afraid of data.

And then there's common sense. I was one of just a handful of people who received an email on December 31st, 2019, stating that the CDC was tracking cases of an unidentified pneumonia-like respiratory disease in China. This would be the first time I was notified of what we would all later call COVID-19. I spent the next eight months in the trenches with the dedicated men and women of the CDC fighting a once-in-a-lifetime global pandemic. A pandemic that the US public health infrastructure was ill-equipped to fight due to decades of underfunding. And this bill cuts $1.6 Billion from the CDC, states and ultimately our public health infrastructure. That just doesn’t make sense.

If the United States wants to continue to be a leader on the global stage, Congress must be honest, decent, and govern with common sense. This bill does none of that. Let's do better.

Kyle McGowan is a former republican political appointee and the former chief of staff at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).