CDC Blames Budget Cuts For Ebola Outbreak -- After Handing Out $25 Million In Bonuses
There's no accountability like government "accountability." If you're a government official, you just point the finger (from the hand you've just used to cash some big check made out to you).

That's how it worked for CDC bigwigs.

At Wash Times, Kelly Riddell writes:

Top public health officials have collected $25 million in bonuses since 2007, carving out extra pay for themselves in tight federal budgetary times while blaming a lack of money for the Obama administration's lackluster response to the Ebola outbreak.

U.S. taxpayers gave $6 billion in salaries and $25 million in bonuses to an elite corps of health care specialists at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention since 2007, according to data compiled by American Transparency's OpenTheBooks.com, an online portal aggregating 1.3 billion lines of federal, state and local spending. The agency's head count increased by 23 percent during that time, adding manpower and contributing to higher payrolls despite relatively flat funding.

From 2010 to 2013, all federal wages were frozen because of budgetary constraints, but CDC officials found a way to pay themselves through bonuses, overtime, within-grade increases and promotion pay raises.

There's frozen and there's frozen. Frozen for thee is different than frozen for people in charge at government agencies.

For example:

Donald Shriber, deputy director of policy and communication at the CDC's Center for Global Health, received the highest bonus in the six years analyzed -- $62,895 in 2011 -- netting $242,595 in take-home pay in a year when wages were supposed to be frozen.

Nice! Can I please get a wage freeze that pays me $63K?

Meanwhile, there's this from Oliver Darcy at The Blaze: "Texas Hospital Releases 'Low-Risk' Patient 'Reporting Ebola Symptoms' Because Person 'Wanted to Leave the Hospital.'"

UPDATED: Via @instapundit, a Michael Walsh piece at PJM, "Ten Things The Ebola Crisis Tells Us About The Obama Admin." A few of them:

1. If a retread party hack like Klain is the best Obama can do, then the Democrat talent pool is incredibly shallow. Naturally, though, Obama wouldn't think of going outside it.

2. The President considers Ebola a political/messaging problem, not a medical problem. Klain is an an insider process guy, not an expert in the field.

3. The fact that we need a "Czar" to cut across federal agency red-tape and make things happen expeditiously is an indictment of the federal agencies themselves, although no Democrat would ever dare to suggest such a thing. The choice signals that, as Ronald Reagan said, government itself is the problem, not the solution.

5. This is a government devoted to process, not results. Its most deeply held belief -- a by-product of its quasi-Marxist belief in the "labor theory of value" -- is that putting in hours and hitting "metrics" is the job itself, not whatever it ostensibly happens to be about; hey, even if you die, they get paid. In this sense, bureaucrats are similar to to the education majors who teach our children in the public schools, with no particular expertise in anything but theory. And the results speak for themselves.