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In the United States, the National Biodefense Strategy is a biosecurity strategy that the federal government was directed to adopt by the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2017. Following the congressional directive, in September 2018, President Trump announced and issued the strategy. The strategy placed the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services in charge of leading the federal government's biodefense efforts, and designated HHS to lead a committee of high-level officials from the Defense Department, Agriculture Department, and Homeland Security Departments, to review the biodefense capabilities of the United States Intelligence Community and 15 other executive branch agencies.
COVID-19 has demonstrated the enormous dangers posed by biological threats, impacting virtually every community in the world. Mitigating these risks remains an urgent domestic and global imperative. Decisive action is required to build on the investments made for, and the lessons learned from, the COVID-19 response to protect the Nation and our partners from the full range of biological threats to humans, plants, animals, and the environment. Through this Strategy, the U.S. Government will optimize its own efforts and harness the work of essential partners—inside and outside government, domestically and internationally – to assess, prevent, prepare for, respond to, and recover from biological events, whether naturally occurring, accidental, or deliberate, that can harm the American people and the global community.
GAO has reported on the inherent fragmented nature of the federal and nonfederal resources needed to protect the nation from potentially catastrophic biological threats. GAO called for a strategic approach to help the federal government better leverage resources and manage risk The White House issued the National Biodefense Strategy and the Presidential Memorandum on the Support for National Biodefense to promote a more efficient and coordinated biodefense enterprise. This report addresses the extent to which the Strategy and implementation efforts are designed to enhance national biodefense capabilities and any implementation challenges that exist. GAO is making four recommendations to the Secretary of HHS, including working with other agencies to document methods for analysis and the processes, roles, and responsibilities for enterprise-wide decision making.
The United States is re-learning an important lesson in the first decade of the 21st century: adversaries may attack the United States, its interests, or those of friends and allies with biological weapons (BW). The last century witnessed the purported use of glanders by the Germans in World War I and the use of dysentery, plague, and typhus by the Japanese in World War II. But biological weapons were not constrained to wartime settings in the last century. The Rajneeshees, a religious cult in Oregon, employed salmonella to advance their own political agenda. States such as Iraq and the former Soviet Union developed wide-ranging biological warfare capabilities, subnational entities such as Aum Shinrikyo devoted considerable effort and resources to the acquisition of biological agents, and the al Qaeda terror network remains interested in biological capabilities. According to the Director of Central Intelligence, evidence from Afghanistan suggests that al Qaeda was pursuing a "sophisticated biological weapons research program." The 21st century opened with the startling use of anthrax spread deliberately through the United States mail system, resulting in 5 dead, at least 17 infected, and more than 30,000 on preventative antibiotics. It also led to substantial disruptions in normal activities, the revision of long-standing procedures, and the expenditure of several billion dollars for decontamination efforts. At present, the intelligence community assesses that "approximately" a dozen states maintain offensive BW programs and that interest among particular subnational organizations is high. Looking ahead, current trends will be facilitated and made more complex by the ongoing revolution in biotechnology, the continuing spread of dual-use technologies, the potential for diversion or leakage of expertise, evident weaknesses in international accords designed to prevent BW development and use, and the broaching of the perceived moral barrier against use.