Here’s global outbreak preparedness expert Jeremy Konyndyk’s response on twitter:
Look who finally decided to address this!
Let’s dissect everything that’s wrong with this tweet.
“Claims that streamlining NSC structures impaired our nation’s bio defense are false.”
A basic rule of bureaucracy is that your structures reflect and reinforce your priorities. (Bolton knows this)
So what’s left after a “streamlining” reveals what you actually care about. Bolton’s chosen approach to NSC “streamlining” involved decapitating and diluting the unit dedicated to pandemic prep and biosecurity.
He eliminated the Sr Director position entirely, closed the directorate, and sprinkled the remaining staff across other parts of the NSC. That’s the opposite of streamlining. Instead of giving an issue (biosecurity) a distinct institutional presence, expertise, and voice in the policy process, Bolton’s re-org left this issue fragmented across other directorates that were focused on other higher priorities. That choice means that you don’t have a cohesive team able to elevate pandemic and biosecurity perspectives to senior leaders, you just have a few director-level subject-matter experts scattered around with limited influence and little ability to reach decision-makers. (Again, Bolton knows this) Next.
“Global health remained a top NSC priority”
Say it with me: Global health (of which I’m a big fan) is NOT the same as pandemic readiness.
(Bolton knows this, or at least he should) Global health focuses on all sorts of good things overseas. AIDS programs. Vaccine programs. Safe childbirth programs. Etc
What does global health *not* do? US domestic readiness!
(which you’d think is pretty obvious, given the “global” part, but hey). So arguing that prioritizing global health somehow equals biosecurity is just disqualifying-ly wrong.
It’s focused on aid, not biosecurity.
It’s focused on health risks in developing countries, not the US.
These are just fundamentally different priorities. Next:
“expert team was critical to effectively handling the 2018-19 Africa Ebola crisis”
Not remotely comparable to today; no threat to the homeland; and US involvement was not a dazzling success, either. The US response to the Congo Ebola crisis was widely and rightly criticized at the time. At first, the Trump administration refused to deploy USG experts anywhere near it, even as WHO deployed a massive team and took on huge risks.
And look, there were legit security risks in the Ebola zone. I know, because I went out there in April 2019.
Risks were serious but not insurmountable. If USG can deploy civilians in Afghanistan or Syria, we could’ve managed those risks in Congo too, if White House wanted to. Altogether, not a case of the USG leading the way. Rather, putting WHO out front while USG kept a safe distance.
And anyway – this outbreak posed no real domestic risk to the US. There wasn’t much the NSC needed to do to protect the homeland from Ebola in Congo. So pointing to Congo/Ebola as an example of successful US biosecurity is, again, disqualifying-ly wrong.
The point of the unit Bolton disbanded was to protect the US by focusing simultaneously on both US and overseas readiness. We learned this lesson the hard way in 2014 when our domestic and int’l readiness and response streams were housed in different parts of the NSC and got out of sync with each other, leading to vulnerabilities in the US health system. I wrote about it here:
Obama’s decision to create the biosecurity directorate was a direct outcome of that experience. We knew that protecting the US from overseas disease risks meant joining both domestic and overseas readiness, and retaining the institutional memory gained from Ebola/2014. So Bolton’s defense here is entirely bogus.
And what’s more, he’s savvy enough about government to know that.
He’s just hoping to fool those who aren’t.
For more on this, read this oped in the Washington Post by the former leader of the White House pandemic team.
Here’s another piece about someone on the dismissed pandemic team.