https://www.factcheck.org/2020/03/democrats-misleading-coronavirus-claims/
Numerous Democrats denounced the Trump administration’s coronavirus response by pointing to the disbanding of a team within the White House dedicated to coordinating a response to a pandemic.
Bloomberg first drew attention to the move in the Democratic debate in South Carolina.
Bloomberg, Feb. 25: And one of the great problems today, you read about the virus, what’s really happening here is the president fired the pandemic specialist in this country two years ago. So there’s nobody here to figure out what the hell we should be doing.
The next day in a CNN town hall he mentioned it again, saying, “Number one, he fired the pandemic team two years ago.”
Biden also noted it in a CNN town hall event that aired two hours after Bloomberg’s, and in an appearance on CNN’s “State of the Union” on March 1, he said, “[W]e set up an entire mechanism as to how to deal with future outbreaks of pandemic diseases. They [Trump administration officials] eliminated that office when they came in play.”
The Trump administration did indeed eliminate a key position that would have been involved in pandemic response.
The Washington Post reported that former National Security Adviser John Bolton dissolved the NSC’s Office of Global Health Security and Biodefense in May 2018 in a reorganization effort. That’s when Rear Adm. R. Timothy Ziemer, who was senior director of the office, left his post. He was not replaced.
As a report by the bipartisan think tank Center for Strategic & International Studies explains, the Global Health Security and Biodefense directorate “pooled NSC staff focused on domestic and international biodefense and health security issues” and was designed “to plan for and oversee rapid, efficient, government-wide responses to global health security threats.”
President Obama had instituted the unit in 2016 following a yearslong Ebola outbreak in West Africa. Trump appointed Ziemer, who had been coordinator of the President’s Malaria Initiative under both President George W. Bush and Obama, to head the office in April 2017.
Ziemer departed abruptly a little over a year later just as a new Ebola outbreak was starting in Congo. He now serves as senior deputy assistant administrator for the Bureau for Democracy, Conflict, and Humanitarian Assistance at USAID.
Tom Bossert, a former White House homeland security adviser who helped develop the administration’s biodefense strategy and was the designated lead for coordinating the American response to a biological crisis, was also reportedly pushed out when Bolton took over. Bossert resigned in April 2018, a day after Bolton started as national security adviser. Three anonymous sources told the Washington Post that Bolton requested his resignation.
Contrary to some recent news reports, Bossert was replaced with a series of people, but the job of coordinating a pandemic response does not appear to have followed. When Trump announced his coronavirus task force on Jan. 29, he did not name current homeland security adviser Julia Nesheiwat in any capacity.
Just because Ziemer’s position was discontinued does not mean everyone who was part of the team was fired or that all of the functions of the directorate ceased. According to reporting by the Atlantic and the Washington Post, some team members were shifted to other groups, and others took over some of Ziemer’s duties. An NSC spokesman at the time said that the administration “remains committed to global health, global health security and biodefense, and will continue to address these issues with the same resolve under the new structure.”
