“Stop Bashing The CDC”: Government Is The Enemy Until You Need A Friend
After a rough start dealing with America’s first Ebola cases, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention appear to be getting the problem under control. This doesn’t mean that there won’t be more incidents; a health care worker was diagnosed with the virus in New York yesterday after returning from West Africa. But the CDC now seems better able to control secondary infections, particularly among health care workers, who are at the greatest risk.
As the 21-day incubation period lapses without new infections in Texas, dozens of people are being cleared from the watch list. But Ebola lingers as a reminder of how easily safety organizations can weaken and what we must do to keep them effective.
“Government is the enemy until you need a friend,” said former Secretary of Defense William Cohen. Government organizations like the CDC, the Army Corps of Engineers, the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Federal Aviation Administration exist mostly to be our friends when we need protection from harm.
Unfortunately safety organizations like these don’t get much love in between disasters. They get attacked by those who covet their budget. They get attacked by those who hate government in general. They get attacked by corporations that don’t want to spend the money to comply with regulation. And they face political pressure to paper over potential problems that could embarrass some elected official. It’s hard to retain talent under conditions like that.
When we don’t take care of our safety organizations and don’t listen to them, they atrophy. Then disasters happen, and whoever is on watch ducks the blame. The person on watch always uses words like “Nobody could have foreseen …” For example: “Nobody could have foreseen” that the Army Corps’ levees in New Orleans would crumble during Hurricane Katrina. “Nobody could have foreseen” that terrorists might hijack an airplane and fly it into a building on 9/11. “Nobody could have foreseen” that dismantling Glass-Steagall Act protections would lead banks to gamble with taxpayer-guaranteed deposits. Not true. In most cases, agency staff anticipated the problem and tried to warn their bosses, but the boss didn’t pay attention because it was politically inconvenient or too expensive.
Frankly it’s a wonder that our safety agencies work as well as they do. The CDC is a case in point; they got many things right after their original poor response:
- They quickly acknowledged that procedures were not working.
- They didn’t circle the wagons. They listened to international medical organizations that had more experience in handling Ebola in the field.
- They rapidly rolled out new procedures and equipment for protecting staff and training people in the proper use of the equipment.
- Without succumbing to hysteria and political pressure, they updated travel regulations to ve rify the health of travelers from Africa while allowing essential aid workers to move unimpeded.
CDC did not do what so many agencies and private sector entities do in similar situations: Deny the problem, conceal data, refuse to change and retaliate against critics. The CDC responded and recovered more quickly than most. For example, they responded even more quickly than the U.S. Army did in giving our troops adequate protection against improvised explosive devices in Iraq.
Whatever the mistakes of government safety organizations, private sector safety organizations – the ones that exist inside corporations – are often much, much worse. Halliburton Co. and their contractors undercut internal safety processes in the prelude to the Deepwater Horizon disaster, and four years later, they’re still fighting over who’s to blame. American International Group Inc.’s internal risk-management processes failed dismally in the subprime mortgage crisis, and rather than accept responsibility, they’re still arguing over the terms of the taxpayer bailout that saved them from bankruptcy.
Fast recovery is perhaps the best we can realistically ask of any safety organization, public or private, which faces infrequent, catastrophic risks. If we want these organizations to do the job, we need to treat them right. We need to give them the budget they need to conduct drills and stay sharp. We need to give them professional leadership and not put political appointees in charge. And we need to drop the hypocrisy of treating them as the enemy in between those rare but inevitable moments when we need them to save us. Far from failing, the CDC performed well under the circumstances. We won’t always be so lucky.
By: David Brodwin, Economic Intelligence, U. S, News and World Report, October 24, 2014
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