The Media Has “Reported” A Hundred Times that Trump “Dissolved” the NSC Epidemic Unit. This Is a Lie.

The Media Has “Reported” A Hundred Times that Trump “Dissolved” the NSC Epidemic Unit. This Is a Lie.

Nope, it’s the truth. What’s now being rolled out is spin intended to provide political damage control because high-profile consequences have now emerged.

The National Security Council unit dedicated to recognizing and coordinating responses to emerging global health threats and bio-terrorism was disbanded. No centralized coordinating authority was ever established to replace it. Some of the personnel were retained and reassigned to other units having other missions. I posted a link to an article a few days ago that dates back to the time this actually occurred:

May 10, 2018 – Top White House official in charge of pandemic response exits abruptly

…
“What this all adds up to is a potentially really concerning rollback of progress on U.S. health security preparedness.”

“It seems to actively unlearn the lessons we learned through very hard experience over the last 15 years,” said Konyndyk, now a senior policy fellow at the Center for Global Development. “These moves make us materially less safe. It’s inexplicable.”

The day before news of Ziemer’s exit became public, one of the officials on his team, Luciana Borio, director of medical and biodefense preparedness at the NSC, spoke at a symposium at Emory University to mark the 100th anniversary of the 1918 influenza pandemic. That event killed an estimated 50 million to 100 million people worldwide.

“The threat of pandemic flu is the number one health security concern,” she told the audience. “Are we ready to respond? I fear the answer is no.”

@Greg: Oh, so the people actually IN the agency don’t know what they are talking about. Well, that’s what we have media for, isn’t it? To correct those who are actually THERE (though they are reported NOT there).

I guess it’s not a good recommendation to have these agencies if we got such a rapid and comprehensive response (much faster than under the last administration) if such an agency doesn’t even exist. Doesn’t appear we NEED them. Kind of like when the government shut down under Obama and no one noticed until he started inflicting additional pain and suffering.

Did Trump Administration Fire the US Pandemic Response Team?

True.

I ran the White House pandemic office. Trump closed it.

This is likely to be the colossal failure of Trump, not so much of the pandemic itself but rather Trump destroying institutions that protect us. And this is why Trump now has a new lie and spin.

Tim Morrison? Golly gee, why not “cause Kellyanne Conway said so”?

You guys don’t even try anymore. But let me guess, you give yourself a 10?

@Ronald J. Ward:

False

Tim Morrison is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and former senior director for counterproliferation and biodefense on the National Security Council.

President Trump gets his share of criticism — some warranted, much not. But recently the president’s critics have chosen curious ground to question his response to the coronavirus outbreak since it began spreading from Wuhan, China, in December.

It has been alleged by multiple officials of the Obama administration, including in The Post, that the president and his then-national security adviser, John Bolton, “dissolved the office” at the White House in charge of pandemic preparedness. Because I led the very directorate assigned that mission, the counterproliferation and biodefense office, for a year and then handed it off to another official who still holds the post, I know the charge is specious.

The latest updates on the coronavirus

Now, I’m not naive. This is Washington. It’s an election year. Officials out of power want back into power after November. But the middle of a worldwide health emergency is not the time to be making tendentious accusations.

When I joined the National Security Council staff in 2018, I inherited a strong and skilled staff in the counterproliferation and biodefense directorate. This team of national experts together drafted the National Biodefense Strategy of 2018 and an accompanying national security presidential memorandum to implement it; an executive order to modernize influenza vaccines; and coordinated the United States’ response to the Ebola epidemic in Congo, which was ultimately defeated in 2020.

It is true that the Trump administration has seen fit to shrink the NSC staff. But the bloat that occurred under the previous administration clearly needed a correction. Defense Secretary Robert Gates, congressional oversight committees and members of the Obama administration itself all agreed the NSC was too large and too operationally focused (a departure from its traditional role coordinating executive branch activity). As The Post reported in 2015, from the Clinton administration to the Obama administration’s second term, the NSC’s staff “had quadrupled in size, to nearly 400 people.” That is why Trump began streamlining the NSC staff in 2017.

Do you understand what these types of bullshit propaganda tactics by your losing party is going to cost you in November?