Read on Twitter
. @USATODAY rates as TRUE the claim that Obama admin depleted the federal stockpile of medical supplies, and says “for whatever reason” recommendations to replenish the stockpile were not needed. But they really should have looked at budget submissions made by Obama in early 2010s
. @iarnsdorf and I dived into these budget docs for our story yesterday. In the FY 2012 submission - which was made in Feb 2011 and was the first submission made after official end of H1N1 pandemic - the Obama admin asked for a big increase for stockpile https://wayback.archive-it.org/3920/20140402145424/http://www.hhs.gov/about/budget/fy2012/fy2012bib.pdf
That request ran headlong into the Tea Party Wave of 2010 + effort by Republicans to restrict spending, and was denied. Ultimately the stockpile got $121 million less that year than Obama asked for.
Any discussion of the stockpile history that doesn’t mention debt ceiling battle, Budget Control Act, + sequestration is incomplete. We link to all the source docs we drew from in our story https://www.propublica.org/article/us-emergency-medical-stockpile-funding-unprepared-coronavirus
In first tweet, meant “heeded”, not “needed”
