TIL since tweeting this: there is a faction of the left that loudly insists on finding a way to blame Obama for Trump’s mishandling of PPE reqs. It’s genuinely bizarre.
Team Obama wasn’t perfect and every past administration has underinvested in health security (CSIS published a whole report about this dynamic in January). And Congress has not been amenable to health security funding, as Obama found when trying to get urgent funds for Zika.
So yes, let’s all get past the panic-and-neglect cycle the country has taken to health security financing. Many of us have been arguing this for years. Thank you 🌹twitter for angrily @-ing me to educate me on this.
But it’s patently absurd to validate Trump’s claims that Obama left the strategic national stockpile empty, or the country unprepared. That’s horseshit. What Obama WH didn’t/couldn’t anticipate is that the USG would wait 6-8 weeks into a pandemic before acting.
