As bioterror threat grows, federal capacity to respond shrinks

The federal government's capacity for anticipating and responding to a terrorist attack with biological weapons is diminishing at the same time the threat is growing. That's the conclusion of a new report by the nonpartisan Partnership for Public Service, based on interviews with dozens of biodefense experts in and out of government and an analysis of staffing data at five key agencies.

The agencies included in the analysis are the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the Food and Drug Administration, the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service and the Food Safety and Inspection Service.

The report, "Homeland Insecurity: Building the Expertise to Defend America from Bioterrorism," found that half of the federal scientific and medical personnel who work in biodefense at those agencies will be eligible for retirement over the next five years. The demand for experts in a number of areas, including genetics, epidemiology, communicable diseases, microbiology and pharmacology, is increasing in both the public and private sectors, while the supply of skilled personnel in those areas is decreasing.

In addition, medical crises, such as Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome and monkeypox, are hampering agencies' abilities to focus on strategic, long-term staffing challenges.

"Federal employees responsible for our defenses against bioterrorist attacks constitute a civilian "thin blue line" that is retreating both in terms of capacity and expertise," according to the report. What's more, current management systems, especially the federal personnel system, both contribute to the federal government's shortcomings and mask its inadequacies.

"Policymakers, agency leaders and others responsible for our biodefense do not regularly assess our needs for biodefense experts nor comprehensively measure our success and failures in recruiting and retaining these experts. We say that we are fighting a war on terrorism, but the contrast between our military and our civilian systems could hardly be starker," the report noted.

At a press briefing Tuesday, Max Stier, president and CEO of the Partnership for Public Service, said that among other things, the government needs to audit biodefense needs, establish incentives for students to study in critical areas of biology and medicine, and launch a recruiting campaign to draw people into federal service.

"The fact is, we don't know what we need. Nobody's asked the question," said Tara O'Toole, director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Civilian Biodefense Strategies. Biological weapons have the potential to be as devastating as nuclear weapons, but because they are easier to acquire, develop and deploy, and harder to track and detect, she and others believe they represent the greatest national security challenge facing the United States in the near future.

Without a comprehensive, national strategy for defending against biological terrorism, other national security programs are potentially meaningless, she said. Such a strategy must fix the cumbersome federal hiring process, she added.

In addition, pressure from Congress and the Bush administration to outsource as many federal functions as possible are potentially counterproductive in biodefense, O'Toole said. "If you don't have core competency, all your outsourcing will be for naught. I would suggest we've wasted a lot of money on contractors."