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Can we please stop spreading the blatant lie that trump cut CDC funding, he did not:
@freemo I remembered what it was that Trump did wrong about the CDC.
TL;DR: When top national security officials handling pandemics left in 2018 (supposedly pushed out by Bolton), he either didn't replace them or replaced them with friends and allies rather than properly qualified people.
@ssokolow
Except it is not the presidents duty tonhire people internal to the cdc. Why woukd he replace them, thats for the director of the cdc and the people under him to do.
@freemo Point. Not all of the relevant decisions were direct trump appointments, so I should have been more clear that some of it is decisions made either by or as part of internal politicking for/against people he did appoint.
@ssokolow What, can you rephrase this last statement? I didnt understand.
@freemo My intent in posting that was to get to the kernel of truth behind the criticism of Trump.
That criticism being that, whether it was people he appointed directly or decisions made by them, Trump isn't blameless in this, even if only because he appears to be a very poor judge of how people he brings on will affect the function of the organization as a whole.
@ssokolow Except this misses the fact that any restructuring is mostly the result of how the budget is ditributed. Ultimately it is up to congress, not the president, if they want to fund a pandemic team. While the CDC director and those under him would ultimately pick who gets hired for those positions funding determines if the positions exist at all and in what numbers.
So any lack of a pandemic team would be on congress, not trump. Except... the funding was there. The team was reorganized not replaced. Jared Kushner lead the new team shortly after the old team was reorganized. The new team however was pulled in on more of an as-needed basis , which could be a valid criticism, but no one at the time saw any fault in that. It was generally accepted the pandemic team would be dynamic and pull in people if and when issues arose and keeping a smaller staff on it otherwise.
@freemo I'd rather not get started on how Jared Kushner was given too many jobs and was under-qualified for them.
@ssokolow perhaps, and that could have been a valid criticism. but the original claim has so many layers of blatent lies that it is hard to deny. Also funny how no democrats raised any objections about the pandemic team at the time considering they had say over the budget as well.
