Fact Check: Trump CDC Budget Cut Claims False

Breitbart News reports an Associated Press fact check confirms Democrat presidential candidates are falsely claiming that President Donald Trump cut funding and personnel needed to fight coronavirus.

On Tuesday, Breitbart News fact-checked “mostly false” claims by former New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg during the Democrat debate in South Carolina. Bloomberg claimed that Trump had “fired” a pandemic specialist at the White House, and “defunded” the Centers for Disease Control (CDC). The implication: Trump was to blame for the spread of coronavirus — even though there have been just over a dozen cases and no fatalities in the U.S.

The truth: the pandemic specialist had left voluntarily during a reorganization of the bloated National Security Council (NSC), and the CDC cuts — as the agency wound down its Ebola response — were only proposed, not enacted.

The AP confirmed Thursday, in an article titled “AP FACT CHECK: Democrats distort coronavirus readiness,” that much of what Democrats are saying about Trump’s response to the coronavirus challenge is simply not true:

Democratic presidential contenders are describing the federal infectious-disease bureaucracy as rudderless and ill-prepared for the coronavirus threat because of budget cuts and ham-handed leadership by President Donald Trump. That’s a distorted picture. For starters, Trump hasn’t succeeded in cutting the budget.

He’s proposed cuts but Congress ignored him and increased financing instead. The National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention aren’t suffering from budget cuts that never took effect.