When I was a civilian employee with the Department of Defense, the most commonly heard phrase during meetings was, “Do more with less.” There comes a point in time, however, when every seam has been stretched to the bursting point and you just can’t stretch that fabric any further.
Equipment breaks beyond the ability to repair. Employees who have been overworked for far too long resign, retire, or (far too often) become ill and incapable of doing their own work and that of the last three people who quit. When there’s no budget for equipment replacement and a hiring freeze, the agency has no choice but to do less with less.
The least impactful tasks are dropped first, followed a short time later by anything that isn’t essential. In the end, the chaos looks much like the modern-day equivalent of a small handful of desperate peasants trying to hold the castle while Vikings breech the walls.
Doing more with less is a recipe for failure, and this is what we have now at the Centers For Disease Control and Prevention, where the budget has been trimmed repeatedly and about 700 jobs have gone unfilled.
If you think 700 is not a large number, please pause to consider what types of jobs are going unfilled. These are not factory workers who can be easily replaced, but highly skilled professionals. Worse, the executive order signed in January prevents lateral transfers so one simply cannot reassign Dr. X from position A to position B.
Thus, we have an ill-prepared CDC, whose budgets have already been sliced thin, facing a demand that is not just difficult to meet but impossible. Even if the hiring freeze would be lifted immediately and the budget raised significantly, new personnel will need time to come up to speed. They are going to be late in responding, and that means that we risk the same seemingly overnight surge in coronavirus cases that occurred recently in Italy.
Everyone who has ever chased after a mis-parked car knows it is much easier to stop a car rolling downhill within the first few feet rather than once it’s gained momentum down a steep hill. The time to respond to this threat is now, before it spreads. After all, it was “just the flu” in 1918 that infected about a third of the world’s population and killed an estimated 675,000 Americans.
To address this potential crisis, President Trump has put Vice President Pence in charge. This is the same former governor who applied his own version of moral judgment to a medical crisis in Scott County that demanded a quick and effective science-based response. We would be much better served if we had someone in charge of the caliber of former Indiana Gov. Otis Bowen. Unfortunately, our current Health and Human Services secretary lacks Bowen’s background in medicine. Instead, Alex Michael Azar II is a former attorney, politician, pharmaceutical lobbyist and drug company executive.
We, as a country, should have learned a lesson after Hurricane Katrina: It’s important to have a capable, knowledgeable person in charge of a well-equipped and properly prepared staff before an emergency develops.
Instead, we’re focused on ensuring employees’ “loyalty” to the party appointing them.
Can’t we have both? And if we can’t, shouldn’t we put a greater emphasis upon a person’s knowledge, skills, and abilities over their perceived “loyalty”?
Our lives might literally depend upon this.
A lifelong resident of Hancock County, Linda Dunn is an author and retired Department of Defense employee.
A lifelong resident of Hancock County, Linda Dunn is an author and retired Department of Defense employee.
