What Trump winning the election could mean for the CDC

The Washington Post cites CEI expert Joel Zinberg on the changing face of the CDC and what does (and doesn’t) belong in the agency:

“Many of the things within CDC really don’t belong there,” said Joel Zinberg, a former health policy adviser in the Trump administration who co-authored a policy paper last year with Drew Keyes, senior policy adviser to House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana), for the Paragon Health Institute and the Competitive Enterprise Institute, conservative think tanks.

The CDC was founded in 1946 to fight malaria, but over the decades, “diverse and fashionable concerns” such as environmental justice and health equity have crept into the agency’s portfolio, Zinberg said. Those programs should be moved to other agencies, he said, so the CDC can focus solely on preparing for the next pandemic.

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“If you have a split Congress and you can’t get bipartisan agreement on what to do, then you’ll be falling back on administrative tools to do it,” Zinberg said. “And I suspect there’ll be some movement in that direction.”

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Zinberg and other conservatives say they welcome the emphasis on chronic ailments. But such work is better handled by other federal agencies, such as the National Institutes of Health — not the CDC, Zinberg said.

Read more at The Washington Post