The CDC’s Budget Is Larger Now than Under Obama

Authored by Ryan McMaken via The Mises Institute,

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 as some pundits and politicians have claimed 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 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 that used the imaginary “gutting” to claim both that Trump is a fool, and that the reason the CDC hasn’t handled the COVI-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 seven percent larger than it was under President Obama’s last two budgets.

That is, the actual enacted program budget for the CDC in 2016 and 2017 were both under $7.2 billion. But for 2020, the budget Congress actually adopted — i.e., not the recommendation from the White House — is nearly $7.7 billion.

Here’s the analysis from Factcheck.org:

I attempted to re-create this, and came up with a lower number for 2018:

This, of course, is why it’s so important to use budget numbers that reflect actual enacted budgets and and the year-end sums of various budget resolutions. The “proposed budgets” coming out of the White House are next to useless when it comes to actual budget numbers.

Specifically, I used 2020and 2019 enacted numbers from this source . I used the 2018 numbers from this source . This numbers appear to match up with the earlier 2018, 2017, and 2016 budget data from this source and this source .

These facts matter, largely because government interventionists so often seek to create a narrative in which every problem can be solved by a large centralized government with the ability to enact grandiose plans. And if these government agencies don’t seem to know what they’re doing? then it must be because the government has been “gutted” or simply hasn’t been taxing the people enough.