In the event of a chemical, biological or nuclear incident, local hospitals will need extraordinary quantities of antidotes, antibiotics and sera to treat the victims. If the right medicines do not arrive quickly, thousands could die. To be useful, medical stockpiles must be carefully maintained and well managed. GAO found inventory shortfalls, record keeping discrepancies and security lapses that compromise the ability to respond to chemical or biological incidents. GAO found a critical national program running on little more than Post-It TM notes and a spreadsheet.
Terrorism poses any number of extremely difficult challenges to our national security.
Accounting for medical stockpiles should be the easy part. Well recognized principles of program design, inventory management and internal control should be applied immediately to transform the current cottage industry of stockpile management into the national enterprise Congress intended. We hope the very existence of stockpiles will deter terrorists. But in the tragic event we are called upon to open the national medicine cabinet, it must contain the types and amounts of supplies needed to save lives. In addition to testimony from GAO, we will hear today from those responsible for management of the nation s stockpiles.