GOP congressman — who warned Trump about pandemics — offers pointed criticism of proposed CDC cuts

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/03/10/conservative-congressman-who-warned-trump-about-pandemics-offers-pointed-criticism-proposed-cdc-cuts/

By Aaron Blake
March 10, 2020 at 5:24 p.m. EDT

This was the day Rep. Tom Cole (R-Okla.) has been warning about — and essentially predicted. Back in 2017, when the Trump administration first proposed steep cuts to programs that handle disease outbreaks, Cole said, “I promise you the president is much more likely in his term to have a deal with a pandemic than an act of terrorism. I hope he doesn’t have to deal with either one, but you have to be ready to deal with both.”

Now that the potential pandemic has come, Cole is re-upping his long-standing criticisms of the Trump administration’s posture toward preparedness. And on Tuesday, he offered a little bit of an “I told you so,” even suggesting that the situation might not be as bad if the administration had listened to him.

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Cole said that the outbreak of coronavirus is a “sort of vindication of the bipartisan judgment over the last several years that this was really an area we needed to make investments.”

Cole didn’t call out the Trump administration or the president by name, but it was clear that he was referencing the steep cuts the White House has proposed to the CDC and the National Institutes of Health in each of its four proposed budgets thus far. It’s important to note that Congress has fended off these proposed cuts, often increasing funding to the programs anyway in the appropriations bills.

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Even as Cole was appearing at the hearing, though, acting OMB Director Russell Vought testified in a separate hearing that the Trump administration wasn’t changing the proposed cuts in its most recent budget. (Congress has passed an $8 billion supplemental to deal with coronavirus.)

Cole also sounded a very different tune from President Trump when it comes to whether you can just throw money at such problems when they arrive. Trump said two weeks ago that it’s easy to ramp up.

“Some of the people we cut, they haven’t been used for many, many years. And if we have a need, we can get them very quickly,” Trump said. “And rather than spending the money — and I’m a business person — I don’t like having thousands of people around when you don’t need them. When we need them, we can get them back very quickly.”

Without mentioning Trump, Cole rebuked that line of thinking.

“These are investments, if they’re not made for years ahead of time, they can’t be sort of parachuted in at the last minute,” he said. “We can’t make the difference without a sustained plan for investing in what each and every one of you do,” he told the health official in front of him.

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Cole in January authored a Wall Street Journal op-ed that credited Congress with making sure we’re prepared for coronavirus — implicit in which was that perhaps this wasn’t to the credit of the administration’s budgeting process.

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