By Christopher Cole

Law360 (May 6, 2020, 6:01 PM EDT) -- Congress should create an off-budget contingency fund to combat the COVID-19 pandemic like one the Pentagon uses for overseas conflicts, the Obama administration's infectious disease czar told lawmakers Wednesday.

Tom Frieden, former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said during a Capitol Hill hearing that neither one-time spending plans nor beefing up existing line items would suffice for the massive response needed to tackle the novel coronavirus.

As Frieden described it, a "Health Defense Operations" fund, similar to the U.S. Department of Defense's Overseas Contingency Operations fund, would not be subject to spending limits in the Budget Control Act, which was passed a decade ago to rein in discretionary spending.

That way, he said, designated federal agencies could, with accountability controls, spend as much as needed on testing, contact tracing and anything else required to manage the public health crisis.

Frieden's proposal picked up some bipartisan support during the hearing of the House appropriations panel that oversees the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the CDC's parent agency. But Wednesday's event also took on a partisan edge as Democrats criticized President Donald Trump for comments he made as part of his decision to block Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, from testifying at the same hearing.

Trump told reporters Tuesday that he wouldn't let Fauci, a key figure in the administration's coronavirus response, testify because "because the House is a setup. The House is a bunch of Trump haters."

"They frankly want our situation to be unsuccessful, which means death. ... They should be ashamed of themselves," Trump said, according to a pool report. "They want us to fail so they can win an election, which they're not going to win." Fauci would be allowed to testify in the Senate, he said.

Subcommittee Chair Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn., blasted Trump's comments at the outset of Wednesday's hearing, noting that the panel is bipartisan and that Fauci had testified hundreds of times before Congress.

Frieden, who handled responses to outbreaks during the Obama years including SARS and Ebola, and is now president and CEO of Resolve to Save Lives, told the House panel — where the few lawmakers who attended sat far apart, some wearing masks — that a contingency fund is the only effective way to let experts use federal resources to fight COVID-19.

The former CDC chief said during his three decades in public health, he's never seen anything like the novel coronavirus. "It's scary, it's unprecedented. We're learning more each day," he said, and the U.S. needs to head off future outbreaks. "We have to make sure this never happens again."

Another witness, Caitlin Rivers, senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, raised concerns about U.S. falling behind the march of the virus by not having enough testing and tracing.

"It's clear to me that we are at a critical moment in this fight," Rivers said, adding that the country needs to be tripling its number of diagnostic testing among at-risk populations. "We urgently need a national plan for how we will close that gap."

Rivers said the country must also look ahead to the emergence of new microbes that can pose similar unexpected threats, developing programs to "raise the bar of readiness" for still-unknown pathogens.

DeLauro voiced frustration with what she said was a lack of clarity around what steps the federal government needs to take, as states and localities lead on testing and quarantine measures. A solid national testing regime will require a "commitment of serious resources," she said. "The federal government is not [currently] at the center of the determination of how we move forward."

Oklahoma Rep. Tom Cole, ranking Republican on the panel, said he and DeLauro should get talks moving on how to create a health defense fund as Frieden suggested.

"This is really the classic 'stitch in time saves nine,'" Cole said. "This is not a one-and-done supplemental type of problem."

"It's going to be with us for a considerable time until we can develop the therapeutics and ultimately the vaccine," he said. "We're going to have to deal with it more effectively than we have."

Frieden pushed a strategy termed "box it in," based on a virus containment model with four dimensions — testing, isolating, contact tracing and quarantining contacts. He also strongly emphasized protections for the health care sector.

"We must protect the health care workers," he said. "They should never have to put their lives at risk to care for us."

Rivers also urged investment in more personal protective equipment for health care.

Some differences cropped up in the hearing about how far isolation measures should go, as Rep. Andy Harris, R-Md., questioned why social distancing and cleanliness measures are not enough to let small businesses begin reopening.

Harris, an anesthesiologist who has served at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, said it was problematic to use isolation as a blunt instrument. He also questioned shutting down what he said are clearly low-risk outdoor activities such as boating and golfing.

--Editing by Stephen Berg.

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