Slate: Trump Is Putting Us on Course for a Global Health Disaster
Patrick Adams, freelance journalist, and Cameron Nutt, student at Harvard Medical School

“…Presidential budget requests may be little more than political messaging, but funding for the CDC efforts [under the Global Health Security Agenda (GHSA)] … is, in fact, very much in peril. … The Global Health Security Agenda has registered important early achievements during its first four years, and CDC leaders had planned to build on those gains with renewed funding for the program in 2020. … While Congress could certainly appropriate additional funding on its own, CDC officials’ private discussions with House and Senate Republicans have evidently given them little reason to believe that this will occur; well before Trump’s budget request was made public, they sent out internal guidance to begin the closure of 39 of the 49 GHSA programs started since 2014. … Unless enough members of Congress can be convinced to reverse the course President Trump has charted, [the cycle of neglect] will surely continue, with consequences for us all” (3/9).