The ebola virus reached this country at the height of the 2014 campaign, so perhaps it was inevitable that the political parties would try to exploit it. To Republicans, the situation proves once again that President Barack Obama has failed to protect Americans. In one of the milder versions of this allegation, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal published an op-ed faulting Obama for spending Centers for Disease Control and Prevention resources on grants for exercise and healthy diets rather than fighting infectious disease. Some Democrats say, meanwhile, that we wouldn’t have to worry about Ebola if not for budget cuts to the CDC and the National Institutes of Health, for which the GOP alone is to blame. As one especially inflammatory TV ad puts it: “Republican cuts kill.”
Refutation of these memes may be a lost cause, but we’ll try anyway. In brief: Ebola is no one’s “fault.” The United States and other nations should have responded far sooner to the outbreak in West Africa. The CDC could have done a better job managing the situation in Dallas, where exposure to a Liberian patient apparently resulted in the infection of at least two nurses. Yet this is an unprecedented challenge for the American health-care system, and everyone involved — from the president to front-line health-care workers — is acting in good faith and, necessarily, learning on the job.
As for budget cuts, it’s preposterous to assert either that more money would guarantee a cure or that one party alone is responsible for the alleged lack of funds. As The Post’s Fact Checker, Glenn Kessler, concluded after a thorough examination of the budgetary history: “Obama’s Republican predecessor oversaw big increases in public-health sector spending, and both Democrats and Republicans in recent years have broadly supported efforts to rein in federal spending. Sequestration resulted from a bipartisan agreement.”
When you get past the campaign demagoguery, the Ebola problem has actually revealed fundamental agreement between supposedly pro-government Democrats and supposedly anti-government Republicans. The two parties both think that the United States needs an effective federal government to cope with threats such as Ebola. Jindal argues that “the federal government has one duty above all: To protect the health, safety and well-being of its citizens.” He even maintains that the Constitution’s mandate that the federal government protect the states from invasion “should apply as much to infectious disease as to foreign powers.”
Now that both parties have revealed their preference for effective national government, they can think more clearly about Washington’s budgetary issues. Sequestration is more symptom than cause; the root problem is a general refusal to tackle entitlements, tax breaks and other sacrosanct programs, which leaves the discretionary budget to bear the brunt of deficit reduction. And even if there’s no evidence that budget cuts “caused” the mistakes in the Ebola response, it’s likely that more resources, more thoughtfully allocated, may be needed in the near future. The broader lesson is to readjust federal priorities so that leaders actually have the capacity to prevent and, if necessary, govern through crises — and not just blame each other for them.