HHS official to Congress: I’m totally in charge, but that doesn’t mean I can prioritize Ebola prep over puppet shows « Hot Air

HHS official to Congress: I’m totally in charge, but that doesn’t mean I can prioritize Ebola prep over puppet shows « Hot Air: "Harrington’s report came just as the NIH director was complaining that, “if we had not gone through our 10-year slide in research support, we probably would have had a vaccine in time for this.” Though reporting on the alleged “slide” proves that’s nonsense, it does seem worth asking the NIH, then, about how they prioritized their spending. The answer is they don’t. They don’t have to. And, that’s why giant government bureaucracies that can forcibly take their funding from future generations of voters with basically no function for demanding a return on that money aren’t really so great at figuring out what to cut and what to keep.

Further, the posture of Lurie in this exchange reveals, as it so often does, that government officials are surprised and slightly miffed at the notion that they should be asked to prioritize or justify their spending of other people’s hard-earned cash. Just like their “competence” in fighting Ebola, we should all take it for granted that their doing right by us and shut up about it because we’re not doctors. Jordan doesn’t, at which point we learn that, even though Lurie has asserted in front of Congress that she’s in charge of all the decisions, she actually shouldn’t be held responsible for any of the bad ones. She knows nothing of those."



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