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Tea Party, Anti-Obama Budget Battles Left National Emergency Medical Stockpile in Shambles
As the coronavirus outbreak spreads across the country, leading to fears of overrun hospitals and shortages of key items in ERs, many have begun to look for help from something they didn't previously know existed: the Strategic National Stockpile.
The Strategic National Stockpile was established in 1999 as a key piece of America's disaster-response infrastructure. It's a series of warehouses in undisclosed locations across the country, containing huge stores of medicines, vaccines, and equipment in preparation for a national disaster, like a hurricane or an epidemic. The stockpile’s mission has steadily expanded as it confronts new public health emergencies.
The Strategic National Stockpile is significantly smaller than it should be for one key reason and it's a term we haven't heard since Trump took office: The Tea Party. Remember the Tea Party? Back when Republicans claimed that deficits were the most important thing in the world? The post-2010 Tea Party Congresses refused to appropriate funds for stockpile despite frequent and urgent Obama requests.
Dire shortages of vital medical equipment in the Strategic National Stockpile that are now hampering the coronavirus response trace back to the budget wars of the Obama years, when congressional Republicans elected on the Tea Party wave forced the White House to accept sweeping cuts to federal spending.
Among the victims of those partisan fights was the effort to keep adequate supplies of masks, ventilators, pharmaceuticals and other medical equipment on hand to respond to a public health crisis. Lawmakers in both parties raised the specter of shortchanging future disaster response even as they voted to approve the cuts.
There were warnings that we needed to be prepared. But the overseeing subcommitee of the House Appropriations Committee again & again refused stockpiling requests.
A 2010 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention-funded report by the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials urged the federal government to treat public health preparedness “on par with federal and state funding for other national security response capabilities,” and said that its store of N95 masks should be “replenished for future events.”
But efforts to bulk up the stockpile fell apart in tense standoffs between the Obama White House and congressional Republicans, according to administration and congressional officials involved in the negotiations. Had Congress kept funding at the 2010 level through the end of the Obama administration, the stockpile would have benefited from $321 million more than it ended up getting...
After using up the swine flu emergency funds, the Obama administration tried to replenish the stockpile in 2011 by asking Congress to provide $655 million, up from the previous year’s budget of less than $600 million. Responding to swine flu, which the CDC estimated killed more than 12,000 people in the United States over the course of a year, had required the largest deployment in the stockpile’s history, including nearly 20 million pieces of personal protective equipment and more than 85 million N95 masks, according to a 2016 report published by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine.
That was rejected by the Republican House.
Proof of the essentially partisan nature of the starving of the stockpile by House Republicans 2011-2016: the moment they got a Republican president again, the imperative of budget restraint vanished - and House started funding the stockpile ABOVE Trump administration requests.
By late February, the stockpile held just 12 million N95 respirator masks, a small fraction of what government officials say is needed for a severe pandemic. Now the emergency stash is running out of critical supplies and governors are struggling to understand the unclear procedures for how the administration is distributing the equipment.
The stockpile received a $17 billion influx in the first and third coronavirus stimulus bills that Congress passed in March. But there had not been a big boost in stockpile funding since 2009, in response to the H1N1 pandemic, commonly called swine flu.
Sources and additional reading:
https://www.propublica.org/article/us-emergency-medical-stockpile-funding-unprepared-coronavirus