In Reply to: The media seems to have missed this story posted by mh on June 22, 2025 at 10:15:56
The United States maintains more than 750 military bases around the world—not just to fight wars, but to prevent them. That same principle has guided U.S. investment in the global footprint of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)—the agency tasked with protecting the health and security of Americans—to build and “forward deploy” critical defenses against biological threats worldwide.
For decades, CDC’s global network of over 60 country offices and regional hubs have functioned as forward-deployed biodefense bases. These bases provide early detection and rapid response capabilities at the source of biological threats—before they can reach U.S. shores. Built on the foundation of longstanding U.S. health investments abroad, like the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) and global polio eradication efforts, this system operates as a global early-warning system for biological threats. The system is powered by a highly trained workforce and partnerships with trusted allies who serve as America’s first line of defense against biological threats, whether naturally occurring, accidental, or deliberately engineered.
This biodefense system is so central to U.S. national security, and the biological threats are so acute and constant, that the U.S. Government has worked for the last decade, across administrations, to develop a playbook for biological threat response. That playbook, finalized in the Biden administration and handed over to the Trump administration, directs CDC to lead U.S. government responses to biological threats emerging outside of the United States. CDC has exercised that role regularly, leading government-wide responses to Marburg, Ebola and Mpox outbreaks in the last six months alone. This system kept Americans safe during four years of the Biden administration, through dozens of emerging threats, many of which were unknown to most Americans.
Over the last few months, the Trump administration has weakened or eliminated the layers of the U.S. biodefense system – dismantling the U.S. Agency for International Development’s programs around the world, eroding the National Security Council’s real-time coordination capability during threats, eliminating the White House pandemic office, and most recently, cancelling proactive investments in safeguards like pandemic influenza vaccines. Amid those changes, one of our strongest defenses against biological threats abroad has been the enduring partnerships and systems maintained by the CDC. However, with the release of President Trump’s budget request earlier this month, the administration signaled an intent to weaken — if not entirely dismantle — this critical safeguard that allows the U.S. to detect outbreaks at their source, leaving Americans and the world more vulnerable to biological threats.