This is how the budget process in Washington begins. Step one: the president submits his budget to Congress. Step two: Congress puts the president’s budget in a drawer somewhere and forgets about it. Step three: Congress passes a budget it likes instead.
This reality, however, has been conveniently ignored in recent weeks. Some pundits and politicians have claimed that Donald Trump “gutted the CDC.”
Trump has been busy “slashing the government agencies” that combat disease control, one headline reads. Another claims, “the Trump administration has spent the last two years gutting critical positions and programs that…weakened the federal government’s ability to manage a health crisis.”
Well, it’s possible that there is a federal program out there somewhere that Donald Trump “gutted,” but the CDC isn’t one of them.
This is largely because Congress ignored the administration’s budget request and increased the CDC’s budget from 2017 to 2018 and again from 2019 to 2020. Trump didn’t object. As ABC news reports:
All of Trump’s budget proposals have called for cuts to CDC funding, but Congress has intervened each time by passing spending bills with year-over-year increases for the CDC that Trump then signed into law.
Nevertheless, leftists of all stripes have used the imaginary “gutting” to claim both that Trump is a fool and that the reason the CDC hasn’t handled the COVID-19 outbreak with flying colors is because its budget has been “gutted,” “slashed,” and “depleted.”
But here’s the reality: the CDC’s budget is now more than 7 percent larger than it was under President Obama’s last two budgets. That is, the actual enacted program budgets for the CDC in 2016 and 2017 were both under $7.2 billion, but for 2020 the budget Congress adopted for it is nearly $7.7 billion.
You can read more HERE.
