Americans for Tax Reform president Grover Norquist appeared on Fox Business Network’s “The Willis Report,” hosted by Gerri Willis, to discuss wasteful NIH and CDC spending, and their failed response to the ebola crisis. An excerpt of his comments is below:
“It’s kind of sad that the Democratic groups, instead of trying to solve the problem, are trying to exploit this crisis for political gain- step one. Step two, let’s look at the numbers- in 1980, the National Institute of Health had $3 billion, today, it’s 10 times that size: $30 billion. The Center for Disease Control, which is supposed to be focusing on this sort of stuff, has about $6 billion. It got an extra $4 billion over the past few years, and they turned around and spent about 6% of that on infectious diseases. So the Center for Disease Control and the NIH decided to make Ebola and other similar infectious diseases not exactly a top priority. They say if they had more money, they would have done something. They had $30 billion. They had lots of money and they chose to spend it other places.”