Joe Biden has made pandemic preparedness a theme of his attacks on President Trump in recent weeks.
But, according to analysis from Gregg Re at Fox News, the Obama-Biden administration repeatedly sought to cut hundreds of millions of dollars in funding to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), “seemingly undercutting former Vice President Joe Biden’s repeated attacks on the Trump White House for its pandemic preparedness.”
The budget requests are available online via the CDC website.
On many occasions, Democrats, including Biden, have falsely accused President Trump of slashing the CDC’s budget. Biden has used these false claims to suggest that he would never even propose similar cuts, let alone make them. Fact checks from the Associated Press and FactCheck.org both proved the claims made by Biden and others to be wrong, because CDC funding actually increased during the Trump administration.
Here are the cuts requested by the Obama-Biden administration for the CDC
Some of the cuts sought by Obama and Biden “specifically took aim at the CDC’s preparedness initiatives.” The Wall Street Journal reported in 2012 that “President Obama’s 2012 budget calls for paring some of that spending. Funding for a public health emergency preparedness program run by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was cut by about $72 million below fiscal 2010 levels in the budget proposal.”
Biden claimed during the February debate that the Obama-Biden administration increased the budgets for the CDC and NIH, but Trump “wiped all that out. … He cut the funding for the entire effort.” But the budget cuts were rejected by Congress.
Joe Biden’s repeated lies about Trump cutting the budgets were bad enough, but the fact that he and Obama repeatedly tried to cut the CDC’s funding makes his lies even worse.
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Matt Margolis is the author of Trumping Obama: How President Trump Saved Us From Barack Obama’s Legacy and the bestselling book The Worst President in History: The Legacy of Barack Obama. You can follow Matt on Twitter @MattMargolis
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