Despite claiming that a lack of money contributed to the less than optimal handling of the Ebola outbreak in the U.S., The Washington Times revealed Thursday that since 2007, top officials at the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) received $25 million in bonuses and $6 billion in salaries, all footed by U.S. taxpayers.
Even though all federal wages were frozen between 2010 and 2013 due to budgetary constraints, the data compiled by American Transparency's OpenTheBooks.com shows that CDC officials managed to work around the limitations to pay out bonuses and overtime.
"Donald Shriber, deputy director of policy and communication at the CDC's Center for Global Health, received the highest bonus in the six years analyzed - $62,895 in 2011 - netting $242,595 in take-home pay in a year when wages were supposed to be frozen," wrote The Washington Times.
National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins said last week that "the CDC had been working on an Ebola vaccine for more than a decade but was hampered by shrinking budgets," reported The Washington Times.
"Frankly, if we had not gone through our 10-year slide in research support, we probably would have had a vaccine in time for this that would've gone through clinical trials and would have been ready," Collins told The Huffington Post.
As the Washington Post noted last week, the CDC budgets have "bounced around $6.5 billion in recent years," and the organization receives both congressional appropriation and, since 2010, "hundreds of millions of dollars from the Prevention and Public Health Fund established by the Affordable Care Act."
In 2013 and 2014, the White House proposed cuts to the CDC's funding, said the Post, but Congress added nearly $700 million to its funding in 2013, and boosted its funding to $6.9 billion in 2014, $567 million more than in 2013, which doesn't include the nearly $4 billion in mandatory fees.
CDC still passed out bonuses and added 1,888 positions between 2007 and 2013, reported the Times, and CDC employees earn more than the average federal worker.
"According to figures kept by the Office of Personnel Management, the average salary for a full-time federal employee working on a permanent appointment was $79,030 as of September 2013, the most recent date for which the figure has been released," reported The Washington Times. "The average salary for a CDC employee was $95,015 last year, OpenTheBooks shows."
Check out NewsBusters' list, which details 15 more ways the CDC and NIH could have funded their Ebola preparation programs by redirecting some of the $15,135,574,669 spent on what some might consider wasfetul projects.
