The Trump Administration Is Stalling an Intel Report That Warns the U.S. Isn’t Ready for a Global Pandemic

https://time.com/5799765/intelligence-report-pandemic-dangers/

By John Walcott
March 9, 2020

An annual intelligence report that has been postponed without explanation by President Donald Trump’s administration warns that the U.S. remains unprepared for a global pandemic, two senior government officials who have reviewed a draft of the report tell TIME.

The office of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) was scheduled to deliver the Worldwide Threat Assessment to the House Intelligence Committee on Feb. 12 and the hearing has not been rescheduled, according to staffers and members of the House and Senate intelligence committees. The DNI’s office declined requests for a comment on the status of the report. Democratic staffers say they do not expect the report to be released any time soon.

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The final draft of the report remains classified but the two officials who have read it say it contains warnings similar to those in the last installment, which was published on January 29, 2019. The 2019 report warns on page 29 that, “The United States will remain vulnerable to the next flu pandemic or large-scale outbreak of a contagious disease that could lead to massive rates of death and disability, severely affect the world economy, strain international resources, and increase calls on the United States for support.”

The 2019 warning was the third time in as many years that the nation’s intelligence experts said that a new strain of influenza could lead to a pandemic, and that the U.S. and the world were unprepared.

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The 2019 warning was the third time in as many years that the nation’s intelligence experts said that a new strain of influenza could lead to a pandemic, and that the U.S. and the world were unprepared.Rather than acting on these recurrent warnings and bolstering America’s ability to respond to an outbreak, the Trump administration has instead cut back money and personnel from pandemic preparedness. In May 2018, Trump’s aides dismissed the National Security Council’s global health security staff and moved to cut its budget. The White House also cut the budgets of the Centers for Disease Control and the Department of Health and Human Services, and closed the federal government’s $30 million Complex Crises Fund.

The postponement of the threat assessment is a concern beyond what it says about the dangers of pandemics, administration critics say. As worrying as the current global outbreak of the coronavirus disease COVID-19 is, it is hardly the only threat the U.S. faces worldwide. Other dangers flagged in the 2020 report, according to the two sources, include Iran’s return to nuclear enrichment, North Korea’s accelerated launching of missiles and the increasingly urgent national security risks posed by climate change.

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Beyond pandemic preparedness, there are several foreign and national security threats over which the consensus position of the intelligence community and the President conflict.

Trump continues to deny or downplay Russia’s efforts to interfere in U.S. elections through propaganda and disinformation promulgated on bogus social media accounts. The threat assessment has warned for years that “Russia poses a cyber espionage, influence and attack threat to the United States and our allies.”

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Similarly, the recent fires in Australia, the African drought, and extreme weather, as well as new scientific reports on melting polar ice and rising sea levels, resemble the intelligence estimates of the dangers of climate change. The 2019 assessment, revisited in this year’s draft version, warned that, “Climate hazards such as extreme weather, higher temperatures, droughts, floods, wildfires, sea level rise, soil degradation, and acidifying oceans are intensifying, threatening infrastructure, health, and water and food security.”

Trump’s 2021 budget proposal would cut the budget of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency by 31% and the Environmental Protection Agency budget by 37%.

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