White House Will Ask for Emergency Coronavirus Funds

The White House budget office also said it intended to move $535 million allocated for the prevention and treatment of the Ebola virus during the current fiscal year.

Russell T. Vought, the acting director of the Office of Management and Budget, said in a letter to Congress obtained by The New York Times that the funds would be spent on emergency medical supplies, lab testing, the development of vaccines and other forms of monitoring, among other features. And it indicated that the Trump administration was prepared to send money to states helping with the national response.

“I urge the Congress to take swift action to provide the additional funding requested,” Vought wrote.

Since Congress will have to approve the $1.25 billion in new funds and permit the transfer of $535 million intended for the Ebola virus, lawmakers will most likely consider adding additional funds to replace the transferred money. Within hours of the request, Democratic lawmakers indicated their displeasure with the prospect of allowing existing funds to be repurposed instead of allocating separate funds.

Rep. Nita M. Lowey of New York, the chairwoman of the House Appropriations Committee, called the request “woefully insufficient to protect Americans from the deadly coronavirus outbreak.”

“It is profoundly disturbing that their answer now is to raid money Congress has designated for other critical public health priorities,” she said in a statement. “Worse still, their overall request still falls short of what is needed for an effective, comprehensive government-wide response.”

Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York, the Senate Democratic leader, said in a statement Monday night that the emergency request was “too little too late.”

“That President Trump is trying to steal funds dedicated to fight Ebola — which is still considered an epidemic in the Democratic Republic of the Congo — is indicative of his towering incompetence and further proof that he and his administration aren’t taking the coronavirus crisis as seriously as they need to be,” Schumer said.

A spokeswoman for the Senate Appropriations Committee majority said the panel would take the administration’s input into account while determining what resources are needed.

Frustration with what some see as a lackadaisical response mounted Monday as the toll of the virus rose. Senators are expected to attend a briefing on the coronavirus Tuesday morning, the latest in a series of them.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention confirmed 19 new cases in the United States on Monday, nearly all of them involving former passengers on the Diamond Princess cruise ship docked in Japan who are now quarantined on military bases. Stock prices tumbled on fears that the virus would do real harm to the global economy, and new hot spots expanded in Italy and Iran.

Local health officials around the country are struggling to keep up with the costs of screening and monitoring passengers arriving from China and other parts of the world.

As the coronavirus outbreak veers toward a global pandemic, lawmakers are watching the White House for any sense of urgency. A White House Ebola response coordinator named in 2014 is no longer there nor is a dedicated position at the National Security Council for global health security. In 2018, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention narrowed its epidemic work to 10 countries, from 49, declaring victory on the global health security agenda started by the previous administration.

On Monday afternoon, the acting deputy secretary of homeland security, Kenneth T. Cuccinelli II, complained on Twitter that he could not gain access to a Johns Hopkins University map of the spreading outbreak, leading critics to wonder why Cuccinelli, a member of the president’s coronavirus task force, needed the Hopkins data.

A senior administration official on Monday dismissed Democratic concerns that the White House was unprepared. Global health is still being monitored; responsibility has simply been moved to the National Security Council’s programs to counter the proliferation of nuclear weapons and defend against biological attacks, the official said.

Ronald Klain, who managed the Obama administration’s response to the Ebola virus, compared the move to abolishing the fire department and instead having people fight fires only when terrorists set them.

“There are a lot of fires that terrorists don’t set,” he said.

When he left the White House, Klain said, a permanent position was created to sustain the work he was doing overseeing the White House’s pandemic preparedness. Then John Bolton scrapped the role in 2018 when he was the national security adviser, hindering the White House’s ability to coordinate with other countries.

“There’s no one in charge at the White House who’s prepared to respond to a naturally occurring pandemic,” Klain said.

Trump defended his team’s handling of the outbreak Monday, saying the virus was “very much under control” in the United States. “We are in contact with everyone and all relevant countries,” he wrote on Twitter. “CDC & World Health have been working hard and very smart. Stock Market starting to look very good to me!”

Before its request for emergency funds, the Trump administration said it could shuffle money between accounts to fund its coronavirus response, pulling mainly from a $105 million rapid response fund at the CDC and upward of $136 million diverted from other federal programs.

The president’s budget request for the fiscal year that begins in October slashes the CDC’s budget by almost 16%, and the Department of Health and Human Services by almost 10%. Tens of millions of dollars would come from the department’s Office of Public Health Preparedness and Response and its Hospital Preparedness Program, which helps hospitals handle surges of patients during disease outbreaks.

The administration also proposed cutting more than $85 million from the CDC’s National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases. The center directly works on outbreaks like the coronavirus, which is believed to have emerged from live animals in Wuhan, China.

Before the coronavirus outbreak, the Trump administration had already narrowed its epidemic work in countries around the world. Its latest budget request included $3 billion in cuts to global health programs, including a 53% cut to the World Health Organization and a 75% cut to the Pan American Health Organization.

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At a Senate hearing this month, Alex Azar, the secretary of health and human services, said that his budget prioritized the CDC’s infectious disease program and his department’s hospital preparedness efforts, and that the CDC had begun working with local health departments to test people with flulike symptoms for the coronavirus.

A CDC spokesman said Monday that more than 800 people at the agency were working on the coronavirus, including more than 250 who had visited quarantine sites, airports and other state-level locations.

But Michael T. Osterholm, the director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, said hospitals badly needed more preparedness funding.

“Congress and the White House need to take the lead in assuring the public that they are on top of it, in the sense that there are no magic bullets,” he said. “No vaccine is going to save us. Drugs are going to be in short supply. Our health care systems, which are in many ways hanging on by a thread, are going to need some shoring up right now.”

Azar will appear this week before several House committees, and next week the Senate will question top health and human services officials.

“I don’t see meaningful evidence we’re preparing and using this time,” said Jennifer Nuzzo, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security.

Meantime, local health departments have been scrambling to monitor the thousands of people returning to the United States from China. A bipartisan group of senators this month wrote to Azar asking how the federal government plans to reimburse states for costs that could already be in the tens of millions of dollars.

Sen. Brian Schatz, D-Hawaii, said he began receiving text messages from local officials in his state weeks ago, pleading with him to ask the Trump administration to help with possible coronavirus cases.

State officials at Honolulu’s international airport, one of 20 across the nation with a quarantine station, learned from a news release that the airport was one of the few ports of entry for flights from China, Schatz said.

“We were having discussions and arguments and disputes about how to deal with a quarantine and where that quarantine would be while planes from China were in the air,” Schatz said. He accused the administration of “treating adverse information as if it is a political attack, and not something that they need to get on top of.”

Last week, Cassidy, Schatz and four other senators introduced legislation that would automatically fund a permanent pool of public health emergency money. The health secretary could then dispense resources the way that the Federal Emergency Management Agency does with natural disasters, without as much dependence on congressional action.

“We are taking the same paradigm and applying it to infectious diseases,” Cassidy said.

More than two dozen Senate Democrats wrote this month to Robert C. O’Brien, the national security adviser, asking why he had not reinstated a pandemic response coordinator.

Cassidy echoed those concerns. “There should be someone on the NSC dedicated to this,” he said.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times .

White House Will Ask for Emergency Coronavirus Funds

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