WOW: NYT on Government Failures in Competence

You know government haters have a special opportunity to advance their case, when even a columnist for the establishment paper of record, The New York Times, feels the necessity to write about government incompetence.

Joe Nocera writes today in NYT:

The Ebola outbreak is not exactly enhancing the C.D.C.'s reputation for competence. At first, the agency reassured the public that American hospitals were ready to handle any Ebola cases that came their way. That has turned out not to be the case. When Thomas Eric Duncan was diagnosed with Ebola in Dallas, the C.D.C. did not immediately fly in an expert team — something that the C.D.C. director, Tom Frieden, now says it should have done. Most recently, the C.D.C. appears to have allowed one of the Dallas nurses who helped Duncan to take a flight from Ohio to Texas even though she had a slightly raised temperature. When it became clear that she had contracted the virus — the second nurse to do so — Frieden was forced to admit that letting her on the plane was a mistake.

Meanwhile, Frieden, a highly respected public health expert, had to walk back some of his remarks. Congress — including Democrats — appears dismayed by the mistakes. Perhaps the biggest one the C.D.C. made was that its voluntary guidelines for treating Ebola patients were too lax. In The Times a few days ago, Donald G. McNeil quoted several experts saying the protocols established by the C.D.C. were, in the words of one, “absolutely irresponsible and dead wrong.”...

When you think about it, many of the Obama administration’s “scandals” have been failures of competence. The Secret Service let a man leap over the White House fence and get into the White House. The Veterans Health Administration covered up unconscionable delays in treating veterans. The error-ridden rollout of the Obamacare website was a nightmare for people trying to sign up for health insurance. The Republican right takes it as an article of faith that the national government can’t do anything right. Problems like these only help promote that idea.

And now comes the C.D.C. — the most trusted agency in government — thrust in a role for which it was designed: advising us and protecting us from a potential contagion. With every new mistake, it becomes, in the public eye, just another federal agency that can’t get it right.

Wow.