Thanks for your comment. I am afraid you are confusing being confident about understanding part of the problem with being arrogant. In this context being called arrogant doesn't bother me at all. I know I am right.

And yes, I could probably do a better job of running the CDC. Do you know why? Because, as a seasoned entrepreneur who has made plenty of mistakes in life the one thing I have learned is that surrounding yourself with the best people you can find is perhaps the most crucial success factor for any venture. I certainly would not be on TV with a deer-in-the-headlights look constantly spewing shifting information. And I certainly would have had systems in place a decade ago to deal with chem/bio attacks.

This is not a difficult problem is you are proactive. You can turn something relatively simple into a nightmare if you ignore it for long enough. Just don't file your taxes for thirteen years and see what happens.

Anyhow, I do not and have not disputed the CDC's valuable contribution to society. All I am proposing is that they have wasted 13 the 13 years since 9/11 not getting ready for a bio/chem attack in the US.

You are also wrong about the proposed private enterprise contest being 20% of the CDC's budget. Why? Because it would have been done once about ten years ago. So, the real percentage would have to be to the sum of CDC spending for ten years. I don't have the time to do the math. I'll just guess we are talking about maybe 1/8 of your number or somewhere around 2.5% of what the CDC spent in the last 10 years.

You are also missing another very important point: This was a seat of the pants hypothetical scenario. My guess is that you could have a very effective contest with just 25 to 50 companies and grants not much higher than a million a piece with a ten million dollar prize. Yes, I was exaggerating to drive the point that even with such a ridiculous contest we would have better results than what we have now.

And that's the point you are missing on all of this. It is beyond obvious that the CDC and ALL of the other agencies you mentioned, including private hospitals are overwhelmed and rendered almost dysfunctional with just four cases of Ebola temporally spaced across weeks from each other.

Had this been a case where we had twenty or thirty "index patients", to extend the term, in a dozen or more different cities it is likely you would be witnessing something potentially horrific.

If Ebola had been airborne or if we were talking about something equally deadly that was airborne it is also painfully obvious that we do not have the systems and procedures in place to deal with it.

You point about blaming sequestration for the CDC dysfunction is also wrong. Firstly, it appears that in real dollars the CDC budget has been on a constantly increasing trend: http://goo.gl/RXoVQ4. Second, and this is VERY important, and revealing of your philosopy: Not everything is solved with more money. Stop thinking that way. If you have an agency or a department that is wasting money, as most do, shoveling more money at them isn't going to solve the problem.

Proof: This Ebola problem should have been addressed at least thirteen years ago. With procedures and systems put into place in every major city in order to guarantee immediate, precise and effective response. Throwing more money at the CDC today or five years ago obviously wasn't going to change the type of thinking and mismanagement that causes an organization to ignore, utterly ignore, one of the elephants in the room for at least thirteen years.

No, the problem isn't money. The problem is something else. My knew-jerk reaction is to label it "government incompetence" of the kind that can't even build a website with a billion dollars. Except, in this case, people die.

Perhaps it is unfair to focus on the CDC. I'll admit not knowing what their official charter might be. Perhaps they are not even supposed to be an emergency response agency. They sure are at the front of this thing right now. If they are not supposed to be an emergency response agency, who, then, is responsible for responding and protecting us from bio/chem events? And then we go full circle:

What have they been doing for the last thirteen years?