The embodiment of Robert Conquest's third law

From Mission Creep and Wasteful Spending Left the CDC Unprepared for an Actual Public Health Crisis by Eric Boehm.

Over the past three decades, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) has seen its taxpayer-funded budget doubled. Then doubled again. Then doubled again. And then nearly doubled once more.

But spending nearly 14 times as much as we did in 1987 on the agency whose mission statement says it "saves lives and protects people from health threats" did not, apparently, help the CDC combat the emergence of the biggest disease threat America has faced in a century. In fact, a new report argues, inflating the CDC's budget may have weakened the agency's ability to handle its core responsibility by giving rise to mission creep and bureaucratic malaise.

"The CDC devolved into an agency incapable of adequately addressing the serious threat posed by infectious disease, particularly novel diseases for which there is little information about risk, spread, and treatment," says Michelle Minton, a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a free market think tank.

Minton is the author of a newly released study showing just how far the CDC has strayed from its core mission. In addition to combating dangerous infectious diseases like HIV and malaria, the CDC now also studies alcohol and tobacco use, athletic injuries, traffic accidents, and gun violence. While those things can indeed be important factors to public health, Minton notes, they don't seem to fall within the agency's original mission.

They do, however, explain why the CDC's budget has ballooned from $590 million in 1987 to more than $8 billion last year. If the agency had grown with inflation since 1987, it would have a budget of about $1.3 billion today. Total federal spending, meanwhile, has grown from a hair over $1 trillion in 1987 to $4.4 trillion last year—which means that the CDC's budget has grown faster the government's overall spending.

Has all that extra funding made America safer? In 2019, the CDC spent $1.1 billion on its National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion, which focuses on ailments like heart disease, cancer, and diabetes. The CEI report notes that there are at least 10 other federally funded agencies—mostly within the National Institutes of Health (NIH)—engaged in similar health and wellness research.

Instead of spending billions of dollars in recent years to duplicate work being done by other federal agencies, hindsight now suggests that the CDC should have spent more time and money researching emergent influenza-like infectious diseases, a project that received just $185 million in funding last year. This is a failure of priority-setting by both the CDC and Congress, which ultimately controls the purse strings.

Robert Conquest’s Three Laws of Politics were:

Everyone is conservative about what he knows best.

Any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing.

The simplest way to explain the behavior of any bureaucratic organization is to assume that it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies.

The CDC's behavior over the past three decades have been an embodiment of the third law. None of this is new. This criticism of scope creep, budgetary bloat, and inattention to core mission has been around for years. This has been a slow motion wreck. Everyone could see it coming. And when it ended up happening, the excuses have flowed.

We knew this was a problem. We diagnosed and put parameters on the problem. And no one, inside or outside the CDC, did anything to rectify the problem.

Good people with good intentions end up being embedded in institutions which no longer having good intentions, just a will to survive and grow.