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In a pandemic, government efficiency can make the difference between life and death. You would expect our civil “servants†to rise to the occasion. ... the Government Accountability Office, a federal watchdog, is sounding the alarm that for the most part, Washington bureaucrats are dithering while Americans die.In a report released this week, the GAO details dozens of dangerous failings in one government department after another — failings that needlessly put you and your loved ones at risk.Start with air travel. After the 2015 Ebola threat, the GAO urged the US Department of Transportation to draft a plan for safe air travel during an infectious-disease outbreak. Five years later, the DOT is still squabbling, insisting the job should be done by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention instead — travelers be damned....One of the GAO’s most serious concerns is the absence of a specific vaccine-distribution plan. President Trump launched Operation Warp Speed to develop, manufacture and distribute a vaccine for the novel coronavirus. Development and manufacturing are on a warp-speed timetable — or as close as we can get to it in an otherwise slow and daunting process. But the CDC, which acknowledges responsibility for distribution, is dragging its feet....No other agency has performed worse than the CDC. It flubbed developing a COVID-19 test, costing weeks at a critical time. It ignored nursing homes until it was too late. And it misled the public about masks. ...The GAO reports that even now, four months in, the CDC can’t provide accurate data on who is getting tested. In the private economy, these CDC officials would be fired. It’s disappointing that Trump has put up with this chronic incompetence.
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Topic: How the Swamp mucked up America’s coronavirus response (Read 152 times)
