The Center for Biosecurity has updated its annual assessment of US government biodefense spending. Continuing the trend that President Bush began, the Obama administration bumped up the spending in its FY2011 budget to $6.48 billion across the government, for a total of $61.9 billion allocated since 2001. This is about a 4% increase, a little better than just adjustments for inflation.
Since 2001, the United States government has spent substantial resources on preparing the nation against a bioterrorist attack. Earlier articles in this series have analyzed civilian biodefense funding by the federal government for fiscal years (FY) 2001 through FY2010. This article updates those figures with budgeted amounts for FY2011, specifically analyzing the budgets and allocations for biodefense at the Departments of Health and Human Services, Defense, Homeland Security, Agriculture, Commerce, and State; the Environmental Protection Agency; and the National Science Foundation. This article also includes an updated assessment of the proportion of biodefense funding provided for programs that address multiple public health, healthcare, national security, and international security issues in addition to biodefense. The FY2011 federal budget for civilian biodefense totals $6.48 billion. Of that total, $5.90 billion (91%) is budgeted for programs that have both biodefense and nonbiodefense goals and applications, and $577.9 million (9%) is budgeted for programs that deal strictly with biodefense.
Of that sum, 72.8% is in DHHS, 12% comes from DOD, 6.8% is DHS funding, and the remainder (8.4%) is allocated to Agriculture, EPA, Commerce, State, and the National Science Foundation. I continue to object to the Center's using the DOD funding inside of the Chemical-Biological Defense Program as funds spent "preparing the nation against a bioterrorist attack." Although the spending trend is increasingly being moved toward "emerging infectious diseases," the majority is still for biodefense for the military and not deployed for protecting noncombatants. But it's interesting to watch the trends and discuss the US government's inability to justify what it's doing with all that money.
DHS is asking to have its money doubled in Project BioWatch so that it can push to fund the development of "Gen 3" detectors. This continues to throw money down a deep, black hole, as these detectors aren't monitoring the air in the overwhelming majority of US cities (and thus failing the strategic objective against which they were deployed). And all those "white powder" incidents won't alert a biological monitor if the envelopes are opened indoors. But why expect the Obama administration to actually do the hard work and think clearly about this challenge? It's so much easier to just continue the Bush administration's failed policies.
Scientifically, there is no public defense against bio-terrorism, period.
So, you pretty much identified what this is...
"This continues to throw money down a deep, black hole,..."
It's called Pork Barrel...and all those agencies will be funneling the "pork" to their respective "suppliers" for useless services and products, which in turn will tickle those respective donors to pressure their congressional representatives to get behind Obama's plans.
But hey, it's all politics from here on down...
"Democracy, the theory that the people get what they deserve...good and hard."
Posted by: sheerahkahn | 29 June 2010 at 11:50 AM