U.S. Army Command Sgt. Maj. Shelita Taylor dons and clears her gas mask during a team-building ruck march held by the 200th Military Police Command during a ‘CSM Huddle’ in Scottsdale, Arizona, Sept. 16, 2017. (U.S. Army photo by Master Sgt. Michel Sauret)
It’s a natural reflex for the US government to try to develop strategies to deal with issues as broadly as possible, to handle a wide array of contingencies. But in the op-ed below, Al Mauroni of Air University’s Center for Strategic Deterrent Studies argues that the Biden administration’s biodefense strategy, expanding on past strategies, has grown too cumbersome and is in need of a cure of its own.
The senior administration official stared grimly at the assembled reporters.
“We appreciate your attendance here today as we discuss the release of the National Strategy to Counter Radiation Threats. As you know, the impact of radiological threats on national security interests is a critical issue today,” the official said. “The Fukushima incident in 2011 demonstrated the potential mass impact of radiation threats on a modern society. Increasing solar threats enhanced by climate change, proliferation of nuclear weapons, and potential accidents at nuclear power reactors and nuclear-powered satellites need to be addressed by a single national strategy. Whether radiation exposure is natural, deliberate, or accidental, the US government will execute a coordinated interagency effort to protect our nation against these threats.”
The reporters exchanged glances. How could a single strategy ever hope to be applicable to such disparate problems, from rogue nuclear states to solar storms? There were already numerous government agencies responsible for addressing these different nuclear and radiological threats. Would the Defense Department’s Nuclear Weapons Council, for instance, take on the challenges of nuclear accidents and natural radiological exposure? In addition, Congress would never permit the consolidation of these topics under one portfolio, as their oversight function was aligned along the separate execution of energy, defense, and health policy.
Luckily the above is a fiction, and such a counter-radiation policy does not exist. But the scenario serves to illustrate how misplaced another major US policy objective has become over the last few administrations: executing a national biodefense strategy.
Likewise, that strategy prescribes a single approach to natural disease outbreaks, deliberate biological incidents and accidental biological releases. There is no doubt that the Biden administration wants to improve the nation’s pandemic preparedness, and a strategy limited to that topic would be much more appropriate, given the significant size and complexity of US health care. There are at least three major obstacles to this effort: poorly defined terms of reference, the lack of context of how these biological threats are addressed, and the challenges inherent to an interagency response to complex issues. None of these are new challenges.
Four administrations have released national biodefense strategies, each one building upon the former. The Bush administration’s “Biodefense for the 21st Century” in 2004 provided direction for the Department of Homeland Security, Department of Health and Human Services, and Department of Defense to develop new programs focused on the threat of biological terrorism. This strategy was replaced by the Obama administration’s “National Strategy to Counter Biological Threats” which expanded the vision to a more global platform and included the broader scope of biological threats. The Trump administration developed a “National Biodefense Strategy” in 2018 as directed by Congress, building upon the Obama strategy by adding an implementation plan and activities. Now we have the Biden administration’s “National Biodefense Strategy and Implementation Plan” [PDF] which focuses on pandemic preparedness but has to include the threats of biological weapons and biological laboratory accidents because it’s now a matter of sheer rote.
Each administration has seen significant challenges in implementing these policies, in no small part due to the failure to carefully define terms of reference and to appreciate the political constraints of executing such a broad strategy. The Bush administration’s strategy was well-focused and provided funds to respond to the threat of biological terrorism. Unfortunately, after 2009, homeland security had other priorities, and both the executive and legislative branches largely lost interest in advancing the strategy’s goals to improve US preparedness for bioterrorism incidents.
The Obama and Trump administrations’ strategies failed from lack of oversight and direction. The executive agencies with biodefense responsibilities had no new direction or funds other than for global health security [PDF]. Health and Human Services was appointed as the lead for the interagency but had no authority other than to convene working meetings. Nothing new came from these efforts, in part because there is no drive for collaboration across the interagency for these three different biothreats.
The Biden administration has promised $88 billion over five years for pandemic preparedness along with the development of specific goals and an implementation plan that identifies specific agencies to lead and support its efforts. Certainly the continued impact of COVID-19 has demonstrated the need for improvements in US public health. At the same time, the administration still wants a coordinated response on biological incidents that come from accidental and deliberate sources, just as the past two administrations have attempted. This desire unnecessarily confuses the plan’s execution.
The definitions in the Biden strategy inhibit the development of good policy. The very term biodefense is defined as all actions that address bioincidents, which includes all natural, deliberate, or accidental biological releases. A bioincident is when a biothreat causes harm to humans, animals, plants, or the environment. A biothreat is an entity that can potentially cause a bioincident. And the biodefense enterprise is any federal, state, local, tribal, territorial government agency, nongovernmental or private sector entity, or international partner with a role in prevention, preparedness, response or recovery from a bioincident.
That certainly doesn’t leave anyone out. But as a result of this circular logic, it becomes impossible to develop discrete solutions for policy implementation. Biosurveillance, for instance, is not just focused on biothreats to humans, including all hazards to human, animal, plant and environmental health. Those seeking a “near-real time” situational awareness through biosurveillance [PDF] are asking for an incredibly expensive system with significant challenges of data management.
Context is particularly important when the US government develops policy and funds specific programs to address critical national issues. One can identify at least five different sectors within a national biological preparedness effort. These include:
- Disease prevention, managed by public health to protect the public from natural diseases
- Bioterrorism response, managed by law enforcement and emergency responders to protect the public from deliberate biological incidents
- Biowarfare defense, managed by the US military to protect its servicemembers from biological weapons
- Biosurety, managed by laboratory directors to protect its workers and the environment from accidental releases
- Agricultural biosecurity/food biosafety, managed by farms and ranchers to protect food and livestock from biologics
While there are overlaps between these sectors, each has a different mission, different customer base, and different priorities as to what constitutes a “biothreat.” Each has a different lead federal government agency with its own funds and authorities. The overwhelming majority of federal funds goes to disease prevention, and the large number of Congressional committees and interest groups addressing this area reflect that fact.
Even as every presidential administration’s strategy emphasizes “all natural, deliberate, or accidental biological releases” must be addressed, these are sharply distinct factions that execute their programs separately from each other. While the details in this strategy’s implementation plan demonstrate this complexity, it’s difficult to say why putting all of them under a single policy makes it any stronger, and the US any safer.
There’s also the chronological framework of the plan, which again builds on previous iterations and emphasizes prevention, protection, response and recovery. That’s not unexpected — it’s a familiar framework that allows the many US government agencies to coordinate their efforts responding to national incidents.
But this is where the national biodefense strategies have made a consistent failure. While there may be a common response to biothreats (natural, deliberate, and accidental), there is no commonality in the prevention against the threat sources (nature, nation-states, industry) or protection of discrete populations (general public, military servicemembers, workers) against these same threats. Health and Human Services is the agency responsible for coordinating these interagency strategy efforts, but getting the US government agencies to collaborate [PDF] on a common biodefense vision and assessing their progress toward a myriad number of policy objectives [PDF] remains elusive.
The potential for confusion and overreach extends to within the walls of the Pentagon. The Department of Defense has a unique situation in that it does have “biodefense” activities in four of the five sectors listed above. Its force health protection program addresses natural infectious diseases, while a Chemical-Biological Defense Program is supposed to focus on biowarfare agents. The Department operates a few high security biosafety laboratories and supports bioterrorism response. The overwhelming majority of DoD funds is spent on addressing natural diseases, even as the Department talks about biological weapons. The US military views biodefense as protecting servicemembers from nation-states using biological weapons during major combat operations. As that definition is blurred, there is the danger of mission creep by defense agencies seeking to broaden their portfolio, allegedly in line with national policy. Military doctrine can become confused as those typically dealing with counter-WMD missions increasingly intrude on the health community’s programs. COVID-19 has made us hyperaware of the dangers of natural disease outbreaks, but the national security community’s interest in global health security is not necessarily a good thing.
Strategies, by definition, are expected to diagnose a discrete problem, offer guiding policy, and direct measurable actions. Many of the goals and objectives listed in the implementation plan are activities already being executed, as noted by the numerous legal and policy authorities listed in Annex IV of the strategy. Certainly, the US government is responsible for developing policies and programs that address biological threats, but not all biological threats are national security issues. Without proper oversight and clear assessments of the five biothreat sectors, the Biden administration could move this boulder up the hill only to have it roll back down in time, much as Sisyphus was doomed to do.
Al Mauroni is the director of the US Air Force Center for Strategic Deterrence Studies and author of the book BIOCRISIS: Defining Biological Threats in US Policy. The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Air Force, the Department of Defense, or the US Government.
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