Health workers remove the body of Prince Nyentee, a 29-year-old man local residents said died of Ebola virus in Monrovia (September 11, 2014).
Sequestration is pretty much the Republican Party's proudest accomplishment since President Obama took office, because it allowed them to tell their base that they were serious about cutting spending and protecting taxpayers.
The thing is, cutting spending when you should be increasing it can be pretty damn expensive. Case in point:
The sequester required the [National Institutes of Health] to cut its budget by 5 percent, a total of $1.55 billion in 2013. Cuts were applied across all of its programs, affecting every area of medical research.
And that across-the-board cut included the Center for Disease Control's agency responsible for helping fight outbreaks like the Ebola outbreak in West Africa, which had its budget cut by $13 million as a result of sequestration. Now we're looking at
a billion dollar and growing problem. And as Mother Jones
reports, the head of that agency says the funding cuts were felt throughout government and that the impact was severe:
Bell also argued that the epidemic could have been stopped if more had been done sooner to build global health security. International aid budgets were hit hard by the sequester, reducing global health programs by $411 million and USAID by $289 million. "If even modest investments had been made to build a public health infrastructure in West Africa previously, the current Ebola epidemic could have been detected earlier, and it could have been identified and contained," she said during her testimony. "This Ebola epidemic shows that any vulnerability could have widespread impact if not stopped at the source."
Sequestration may not have caused the Ebola outbreak, but it weakened our ability to prevent it. If we'd been less focused on pinching pennies and more focused on spending what it takes to prevent crises like the one we're experiencing today, we'd not only spend less money, we'd avoid the unnecessary deaths of thousands of people.