We Have, We Thought, Someone On the Job Curing Ebola

As Ebola begins to look like it might be a major problem in this country as well as in west Africa, the major media and the heads of government agencies offer the almost inevitable line: We have to give the federal government more money. Even those of us who are not libertarians will want to question this. In this case, for particularly good reason, as the indispensable Mollie Hemingway has argued on The Federalist.

[T]he federal government not ten years ago created and funded a brand new office in the Health and Human Services Department specifically to coordinate preparation for and response to public health threats like Ebola. The woman who heads that office, and reports directly to the HHS secretary, has been mysteriously invisible from the public handling of this threat. And she’s still on the job even though three years ago she was embroiled in a huge scandal of funneling a major stream of funding to a company with ties to a Democratic donor — and away from a company that was developing a treatment now being used on Ebola patients.

She goes on to describe the legislative history behind the federal government’s efforts and the claims the woman who heads the office, Nicole Lurie, has made. (She also describes a funding scandal in which Lurie has been involved.) In a video to which Hemingway links, Lurie

explains that the responsibilities of her office are “to help our country prepare for, respond to and recover from public health threats.” She says her major priority is to help the country prepare for emergencies and to “have the countermeasures — the medicines or vaccines that people might need to use in a public health emergency. So a large part of my office also is responsible for developing those countermeasures.”

Apparently not. Before Congress throws more money at more agencies, someone ought to find out exactly what the government has spent so far and how effective the spending has been.