THE 10TH AMENDMENT SOLUTION TO GOVERNMENT INEPTITUDE

Amber Joy Vinson, a nurse who treated the Liberian man who brought Ebola to America last month, became feverish while visiting her mother in Cleveland.  She called the Centers for Disease Control to ask if it would be all right if she took a commercial flight back to Dallas.

Her temperature was only 99.5, and she wasn’t vomiting, so CDC said yes. Shortly after arriving in Dallas, Amber was diagnosed with Ebola.  Frontier Airlines has put the six crew members on her flight on paid leave. CDC asked the other 131 passengers to go into voluntary isolation.

Since CDC didn’t get around to telling Frontier about Amber’s illness until late the following day, her plane made five other flights before it was taken out of service. Let’s hope she didn’t have to use the toilet.

Under the "leadership" of Dr. Thomas Frieden, the Centers for Disease Control has fought smoking and obesity, built bike lanes, conducted "Zombie Preparedness Drills," argued gun violence should be treated as a public health issue.

When CDC was established in 1946 (as the Communicable Diseases Center), it was created for the explicit purpose of protecting Americans from dangerous epidemics. CDC isn’t very good at that.

Virtually every assurance Dr. Frieden made about Ebola isn’t true. Most alarmingly false was CDC’s claim any U.S. hospital with an isolation ward could treat Ebola patients safely. Only four hospitals in the entire country are fully equipped to treat the deadly disease. Most are woefully unprepared.

CDC will take steps to raise awareness at the nation’s hospitals, Dr. Frieden announced last week. But, as an emergency room nurse noted, "the horse is already some distance down the road."

Our lack of preparedness makes it imperative travelers from hot zones be denied entry into the United States. He opposes a travel ban because it would hurt the economies of West African countries, Dr. Frieden told Rep. Tim Murphy, R-PA.

That’s true. But promoting economic development in Africa isn’t CDC’s job.

"If we had not gone through our ten year slide in research support, we probably would have had a vaccine (for Ebola) in time for this," Dr. Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, told the Huffington Post.

The NIH budget rose from $23 billion in FY 2002 to $30.1 billion in FY 2014. Since when is a 31 percent increase a "slide?" But just $17.65 million (00.06 percent) was spent on Ebola vaccine research. Perhaps if NIH had devoted some of the $39.6 million it spent studying why lesbians get fat, why fat girls have trouble getting dates, origami condoms and other such subjects to vaccine research instead…

And if Dr. Nicole Lurie, Assistant Secretary in HHS for Preparedness and Response, hadn’t steered federal money away from a firm with a promising antiviral drug to one owned by a major Democrat donor, which subsequently went bankrupt, we’d be closer still to an Ebola vaccine.

Government isn’t underfunded. It’s inept and corrupt. So I suppose it’s fitting President Barack Hussein Obama named as Ebola "czar" a partisan political hack with no medical experience.  As Andy McCarthy explains, Ron Klein played a key role in Obama’s Solyndra fraud.

CDC and NIH are by no means the only federal agencies where bureaucrats serve themselves first, the president (if he’s a Democrat) second, the public rarely if at all.

In most agencies, the consequences of ineptitude typically are wasted money, higher taxes, slower economic growth. But neglect and corruption in the VA contributed to the deaths of dozens, perhaps hundreds, of veterans. Ineptitude at CDC could cost thousands of Americans their lives.

Such ridiculous (and dangerous) ineptitude is not an aberration in our ridiculously vast federal bureaucracy — it’s the norm.  We need a 10th Amendment solution for it.

If we want government to serve us instead of itself, agencies must be refocused on their primary missions, and bureaucrats must be held accountable. We must stop rewarding failure, start punishing neglect and corruption.  The best way to do so would be to start abolishing them entirely and turn over their function to the states.   

Call it the 10th Amendment Solution to Government Ineptitude.  Could be something the Ted Cruz Congress could get to work on starting next January.

Jack Kelly is a former Marine and Green Beret and a former deputy assistant secretary of the Air Force in the Reagan administration. He is national security writer for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

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