On May 19, the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services, Education, and Related Agencies (LHHS) held a hearing on the FY 2022 budget blueprint for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
The subcommittee—presided over by Chair Patty Murray (D-WA)—invited Dr. Rochelle Walensky, Director of the CDC, and Dr. Anne Schuchat, Principal Deputy Director at the CDC, to testify on President Biden’s discretionary budget request for the agency. The hearing was largely cordial, with members on both sides of the aisle focusing more on the CDC’s recent mask guidance, rather than the fiscal budget.
Walensky emphasized that the President’s budget request of $8.7 billion for the CDC is the largest fiscal year increase in nearly two decades and will be used to shore up the nation’s public health infrastructure, reduce health disparities, implement violence prevention, invest in health equity programs, as well as defeat emerging diseases and epidemics.
In her remarks, Dr. Walensky testified that the COVID-19 pandemic “threw the world into a health, economic, and humanitarian crisis”—spotlighting the weakness in our public health infrastructure and illuminating vast disparities in health outcomes. She noted that “thus far, we have failed to address systemic racism that results in poor health for people of color in the United States.”
Dr. Walensky ended her testimony emphasizing the need for greater investments in public health infrastructure. She noted that there have been four infectious disease outbreaks since 2009 and that epidemiologists have been warning of a pandemic for years. Walensky stated that “we must ask ourselves, are we ready?” “Our infrastructure needs to be ready.”
Under questioning from Chair Murray (D-WA), Walensky cited NACCHO research showing that the public health workforce has lost nearly 56,000 jobs in the last decade, and said that it is imperative that we train and bolster our workforce to combat any emerging health threats. Walensky also called for investments in data modernization, highlighting that state and local health departments are still using outdated systems, such as fax and manual data entry, to carry out epidemiologic activities. Walensky stated that if we had all these systems ready prior to the pandemic, the United States would have been better equipped to handle the COVID-19 pandemic. NACCHO has been a consistent advocate for data modernization, public health infrastructure, and workforce development. You can read more about our work with Congress and the Administration to tackle these issues here.
