TIME: Trump Admin Stalling an Intel Report That Warns U.S. Isn't Ready for a Global Pandemic
BY JOHN WALCOTT MARCH 9, 2020
An annual intelligence report that has been postponed without explanation by President Donald Trump’s administration warns that the U.S. remains unprepared for a global pandemic, two senior government officials who have reviewed a draft of the report tell TIME.
The office of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) was scheduled to deliver the Worldwide Threat Assessment to the House Intelligence Committee on Feb. 12 and the hearing has not been rescheduled, according to staffers and members of the House and Senate intelligence committees. The DNI’s office declined requests for a comment on the status of the report. Democratic staffers say they do not expect the report to be released any time soon.
The final draft of the report remains classified but the two officials who have read it say it contains warnings similar to those in the last installment, which was published on January 29, 2019. The 2019 report warns on page 29 that, “The United States will remain vulnerable to the next flu pandemic or large-scale outbreak of a contagious disease that could lead to massive rates of death and disability, severely affect the world economy, strain international resources, and increase calls on the United States for support.”
............
Rather than acting on these recurrent warnings and bolstering America’s ability to respond to an outbreak, the Trump administration has instead cut back money and personnel from pandemic preparedness. In May 2018, Trump’s aides dismissed the National Security Council’s global health security staff and moved to cut its budget. The White House also cut the budgets of the Centers for Disease Control and the Department of Health and Human Services, and closed the federal government’s $30 million Complex Crises Fund.
The postponement of the threat assessment is a concern beyond what it says about the dangers of pandemics, administration critics say. As worrying as the current global outbreak of the coronavirus disease COVID-19 is, it is hardly the only threat the U.S. faces worldwide. Other dangers flagged in the 2020 report, according to the two sources, include Iran’s return to nuclear enrichment, North Korea’s accelerated launching of missiles and the increasingly urgent national security risks posed by climate change.
the rest:
https://time.com/5799765/intelligence-report-pandemic-dangers/?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=editorial&utm_term=politics_&linkId=83991966
Link to tweet
?s=20
= new reply since forum marked as read
