Wasteful Spending Behind Lackluster Ebola Response
Federal agencies clamoring for more funding to fight the Ebola outbreak are taking a page from Chicago Mayor Rahm Emmanuel’s playbook: they are not letting a serious crisis go to waste.
Amid complaints that budget cuts have hindered the government's efforts to fight Ebola, a bipartisan effort in Congress is underway to allocate additional funding. The dollars would go to several agencies for the 2015 fiscal year to help them assist with the Obama administration's flawed response to the epidemic.
The Appropriations Committee has already transferred $750 million in Defense Department funds to support the Pentagon's Ebola-related operations in Africa for about six months. The State Department and the United States Agency for International Development have issued a $10 million grant to the African Union, and USAID has promised another $75 million.
National Institutes of Health Director Dr. Francis Collins told the Huffington Post that the "NIH has been working on Ebola vaccines since 2001" and that an Ebola vaccine would have been ready if not for what he called a “10-year slide in research support." However, Ebola was not seen as a problem even as recently as last year. Additional research dollars, if they existed, might have been spent on more pressing diseases, such as Alzheimer’s, cancer, malaria, or heart disease.
In addition, major research agencies, including NIH, Centers for Disease Control, USAID, the State Department, and the Department of Defense, have spent billions on wasteful purchases or otherwise mismanaged funds. If preventing Ebola was on their radars before the outbreak, the agencies’ budgets certainly do not show it.
NIH spent $5 million on a study to monitor Facebook and Twitter for drug abuse, over $450,000 on a study to discover why gay men in Peru contract syphilis, and nearly $200,000 to reveal how transwomen use Facebook.
In April, USAID awarded $24.4 million for circumcisions in Swaziland, and $10.4 million to "empower" girls in Malawi to use birth control. Another $111,000 was allocated for social media outreach in Uganda, where only 15 percent of the country has access to the Internet. It is safe to assume that residents of these African countries would have preferred these funds to be used for Ebola prevention.
The CDC has spent $25 million on bonuses since 2007, including a single $62,895 bonus in 2011 to Donald Shriber, deputy director of policy and communication at the CDC's Center for Global Health.
President Obama’s appointment of Ron Klain as his new Ebola “czar” will do nothing to remedy past wasteful spending at federal health, defense, and aid agencies. Klain will also have a difficult time bringing oversight to these agencies.
The State Department has done a poor job tracking the billions it has issued to contractors, according to the State Department’s Inspector General. One report found that the Department did not adequately track $6 billion in payments to contractors. Another report found that $70 million could have been lost in Africa alone. Ebola prevention and treatment grants to the African Union must be monitored so the State Department does not lose taxpayer money again.
The Department of Defense was slated earlier this year to destroy $1.2 billion in ammunition—which would have been more than enough to cover the amount it has had to transfer for its humanitarian efforts in West Africa. Plus, Congress used the Pentagon's budget to fund nearly $20 billion in pet projects last year. Smarter management is needed at the Department of Defense.
Companies could move faster to cure a wide range of diseases if the Food and Drug Administration were to streamline its regulations, encouraging innovation. Economics21 director Diana Furchtgott-Roth has described examples of drugs that are approved overseas, but stalled in the FDA approval process. Drug technologies build on each other. Slower approval in the present means fewer available new drugs in the future.
Throwing more money at agencies by appointing an Ebola czar will not solve the epidemic if the funds are mismanaged and if FDA prevents new cures from coming on the market. Without necessary safeguards and reforms, additional funding will continue to perpetuate a culture of unaccountability and waste. Maybe all of us should take Rahm Emmanuel’s advice and use the Ebola crisis as a chance to evaluate how federal agencies manage their resources.
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