the "Trump is cutting funds" myth

People invested in constantly portraying President Trump in a bad light have been pushing the lie that Trump has been cutting funds from the CDC and other entities, and that he has declared the COVID-19 outbreak "a hoax." If you're gullible enough to believe such nonsense thanks to your confirmation bias and Trump Derangement Syndrome, I guess there's no helping you. From Fox News:

The Associated Press is calling out two leading Democratic presidential candidates for what the outlet says were inaccurate comments about the government's ability to address diseases like the coronavirus.

Former Vice President Joe Biden and former New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg were "both wrong" to say critical health agencies faced funding cuts. While discussing the coronavirus during Tuesday's debate, those candidates blamed President Trump for restricting resources for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and National Institutes of Health (NIH).

“There’s nobody here to figure out what the hell we should be doing. And he’s defunded — he’s defunded Centers for Disease Control, CDC, so we don’t have the organization we need. This is a very serious thing," Bloomberg said.

Biden similarly indicated Trump reversed the Obama-Biden administration's budget increases to those agencies.

“We increased the budget of the CDC. We increased the NIH budget. ... He’s wiped all that out. ... He cut the funding for the entire effort," he said.

But according to the AP, Trump's proposed budget cuts never went into effect. Funding to fight the latest outbreak also came from a congressional fund created for health emergencies.

Some public health experts say a bigger concern than White House budgets is the steady erosion of a CDC grant program for state and local public health emergency preparedness — the front lines in detecting and battling new disease. But that decline was set in motion by a congressional budget measure that predates Trump.

A few points. From the above article, it seems Trump might have intended to do some budget-cutting. However, it's likely that Trump's timing had nothing to do with the COVID-19 outbreak, so it almost certainly wasn't a response to the outbreak, which is what both Biden and Sanders seem to be falsely implying. Second, given the Dem-dominated House of Representatives, which generally manages things like allocation of federal funds, how likely is it that the House would allow Trump to go through with any of his desired budget cuts? Third: given the general incompetence and uselessness of government agencies, I'd say that, even if Trump had somehow succeeded in ramming through certain budget cuts, the net effect would have been beneficial, not harmful, to the nation.

So think what you will about Trump's apparent desire to cut funds from certain bloated government agencies. I don't think his general intent is bad at all. But spinning this to sound as if Trump were cutting funding to the CDC and the NIH in response to the COVID-19 outbreak is lying, pure and simple. Perhaps we'll learn more in subsequent articles. Hats off to the Associated Press for a rare moment of fairness and honesty.