Bureaucracy and Obesity
by Bob Barr

The Atlanta-based Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which has recently taken some hits for how it spends around $7 billion of federal taxpayer money, lacks a clearly defined mission. In fact, it has too many missions and is still looking for more.

Recently, the CDC has come under fire for a publicity-driven study about death rates resulting from obesity. This scandal, which raises serious questions about the agency's competence to conduct credible scientific research, followed on the heels of the agency's comical spectacle last flu season.

First, the CDC claimed there wouldn't be enough flu vaccine for those who needed or wanted it, giving rise to plans to ration the vaccines. Later, it admitted that its earlier estimates and distribution system had been faulty, and that it would be left with a huge surplus of vaccine that would have to be destroyed.

Ever the good bureaucrats, CDC officials responded to that bad publicity by cranking up its not-inconsiderable network of defenders (many of whom rely on the agency for millions of dollars in grants), raising alarm that slight budget cuts proposed by President Bush will harm the nation's war against terrorism.

Not content to rely on the "terrorism card" to boost its budget, the CDC is pushing yet another agenda to justify its desired level of appropriations: mental health.

Last year, for example, the agency reached the groundbreaking conclusion that depressed people smoke more. Not content with curing just Americans, CDC researchers are even aiding mental health victims in far-flung corners of the world. The CDC team that went to tsunami-ravaged Indonesia, for example, reportedly included a "resilience team" to evaluate the "mental health needs" of disaster survivors.

No doubt, the resulting report will find that tsunamis lead to mental trauma. A few years ago, CDC researchers stunned the Western world by finding that a large percentage of Albanians in Kosovo suffered post-traumatic stress disorder as a result of that bloody and lengthy conflict.

The goal of this expanded focus on mental health is to help Americans "feel more satisfied about their health," said CDC Director Dr. Julie Gerberding. It's hard to know how many hundreds of millions, if not billions, of taxpayer dollars will be spent on this search for the Holy Grail of self-esteem, since funds for the program are not broken out in the CDC's budget.

The CDC's now-infamous 2004 report on obesity, however, revealed its problems starkly. The report concluded that 400,000 Americans a year die from obesity, a figure that threatened to make it the nation's No. 1 preventable cause of death. However, the basic research leading to this alarmist conclusion was deeply flawed, a fact later pointed out by The Wall Street Journal.

An even more serious blow came in April of this year, when the widely respected Journal of the American Medical Association analyzed the CDC obesity report in detail, concluding that faulty research had resulted in a figure several times higher than the actual number of persons who die each year as a result of obesity.

JAMA's research has not been attacked by creditable analysts, but according to press accounts, Gerberding has indicated the CDC would not use JAMA's lower and more accurate obesity mortality rates in its continuing PR campaign. That puts her in the same boat with trial lawyers pushing obesity-related litigation.

Just as trial lawyers are hoping to reap millions from litigation targeting fast-food purveyors and others, the CDC is pushing its publicly discredited study to improve its funding posture with Congress. It's hardly a coincidence that the CDC's first field investigation of obesity is taking place in West Virginia, home of the Senate's emperor of pork, Robert Byrd.

During the Clinton years, the CDC was used to advocate that administration's political, anti-firearm agenda. Its work in that area eventually drew such criticism after the Republicans gained control of Congress in 1994 that restrictions were placed on its appropriations to discourage meddling in such a non-disease area.

Congress should again remind the CDC to stick to its clear, core mission: disease prevention. We don't need to spend billions of dollars so publicity-seeking bureaucrats can tell us what good parents and common sense already tell children:

"Don't eat too much."

Bob Barr, former member of Congress from Georgia, served as U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Georgia from 1986 to 1990.

Email the Editor