Testimony Before the Committee on Homeland Security, House of Representatives

• Statement of Bernice Steinhardt Director, Strategic Issues
• 30 pages
• July 29, 2009

What GAO Found

Leadership roles and responsibilities for an influenza pandemic need to be clarified, tested, and exercised, and existing coordination mechanisms, such as critical infrastructure coordinating councils, could be better utilized to address challenges in coordination between the federal, state, and local governments and the private sector in preparing for a pandemic.

Efforts are underway to improve the surveillance and detection of pandemic-related threats, but targeting assistance to countries at the greatest risk has been based on incomplete information, particularly from developing countries.

Pandemic planning and exercising has occurred at the federal, state, and local government levels, but important planning gaps remain at all levels of government. At the federal level, agency planning to maintain essential operations and services while protecting their employees in the event of a pandemic is uneven.

Further actions are needed to address the capacity to respond to and recover from an influenza pandemic, which will require additional capacity in patient treatment space, and the acquisition and distribution of medical and other critical supplies, such as antivirals and vaccines.

Federal agencies have provided considerable guidance and pandemic-related information to state and local governments, but could augment their efforts with additional information on school closures, state border closures, and other topics.

Performance monitoring and accountability for pandemic preparedness needs strengthening. For example, the May 2006 National Strategy for Pandemic Influenza Implementation Plan does not establish priorities among its 324 action items and does not provide information on the financial resources needed to implement them. Also, greater agency accountability is needed to protect federal workers in the event of a pandemic because there is no mechanism in place to monitor and report on agencies’ progress in developing workforce pandemic plans.

The current H1N1 pandemic should serve as a powerful reminder that the threat of a pandemic influenza, which seemed to fade from public awareness in recent years, never really disappeared. While federal agencies have taken action on 13 of GAO’s 24 recommendations, 11 of the recommendations that GAO has made over the past 3 years have not been fully implemented. With the possibility that the H1N1 virus could become more virulent this fall or winter, the administration and federal agencies should use this time to turn their attention to filling in the planning and preparedness gaps GAO’s work has pointed out.

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Influenza pandemic—caused by a novel strain of influenza virus for which there is little resistance and which therefore is highly transmissible among humans—continues to be a real and significant threat facing the United States and the world. Unlike incidents that are discretely bounded in space or time (e.g., most natural or man-made disasters), an influenza pandemic is not a singular event, but is likely to come in waves, each lasting weeks or months, and pass through communities of all sizes across the nation and the world simultaneously. However, the current H1N1 pandemic seems to be relatively mild, although widespread. The history of an influenza pandemic suggests it could return in a second wave this fall or winter in a more virulent form. While a pandemic will not directly damage physical infrastructure such as power lines or computer systems, it threatens the operation of critical systems by potentially removing the essential personnel needed to operate them from the workplace for weeks or months. In a severe pandemic, absences attributable to illnesses, the need to care for ill family members, and fear of infection may, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), reach a projected 40 percent during the peak weeks of a community outbreak, with lower rates of absence during the weeks before and after the peak. In addition, an influenza pandemic could result in 200,000 to 2 million deaths in the United States, depending on its severity.

The President’s Homeland Security Council (HSC) took an active approach to this potential disaster by, among other things, issuing the National Strategy for Pandemic Influenza (National Pandemic Strategy) in November 2005, and the National Pandemic Implementation Plan in May 2006. The National Pandemic Strategy is intended to provide a high-level overview of the approach that the federal government will take to prepare for and respond to an influenza pandemic. It also provides expectations for nonfederal entities—including state, local, and tribal governments; the private sector; international partners; and individuals—to prepare themselves and their communities. The National Pandemic Implementation Plan is intended to lay out broad implementation requirements and responsibilities among the appropriate federal agencies and clearly define expectations for nonfederal entities. The Plan contains 324 action items related to these requirements, responsibilities, and expectations, most of which were to be completed before or by May 2009. HSC publicly reported on the status of the action items that were to be completed by 6 months, 1 year, and 2 years in December 2006, July 2007, and October 2008 respectively. HSC indicated in its October 2008 progress report that 75 percent of the action items have been completed. We have ongoing work for this committee assessing the status of implementing this plan which we expect to report on in the fall of 2009.

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Private Sector Pandemic Planning

The private sector has also been planning for an influenza pandemic, but many challenges remain. To better protect critical infrastructure, federal agencies and the private sector have worked together across a number of sectors to plan for a pandemic, including developing general pandemic preparedness guidance, such as checklists for continuity of business operations during a pandemic. However, federal and private sector representatives have acknowledged that sustaining preparedness and readiness efforts for an influenza pandemic is a major challenge, primarily because of the uncertainty associated with a pandemic, limited financial and human resources, and the need to balance pandemic preparedness with other, more immediate, priorities, such as responding to outbreaks of foodborne illnesses in the food sector and, now, the effects of the financial crisis.

In our March 2007 report on preparedness for an influenza pandemic in one of these critical infrastructure sectors—financial markets—we found that despite significant progress in preparing markets to withstand potential disease pandemics, securities and banking regulators could take additional steps to improve the readiness of the securities markets. The seven organizations that we reviewed—which included exchanges, clearing organizations, and payment-system processors—were working on planning and preparation efforts to reduce the likelihood that a worldwide influenza pandemic would disrupt their critical operations. However, only one of the seven had completed a formal plan. To increase the likelihood that the securities markets will be able to function during a pandemic, we recommended that the Chairman, Federal Reserve; the Comptroller of the Currency; and the Chairman, Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), consider taking additional actions to ensure that market participants adequately prepare for a pandemic outbreak. In response to our recommendation, the Federal Reserve and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, in conjunction with the Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council and the SEC directed all banking organizations under their supervision to ensure that the pandemic plans the financial institutions have in place are adequate to maintain critical operations during a severe outbreak. SEC issued similar requirements to the major securities industry market organizations.

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The current H1N1 influenza pandemic should serve as a powerful reminder that the threat of a more virulent pandemic, which seemed to fade from public awareness in recent years, never really disappeared. While federal agencies have taken action on many of our recommendations, about half the recommendations that we have made over the past 3 years are still not fully implemented. It is essential, given the change in administration and the associated transition of senior federal officials, that the shared leadership roles that have been established between HHS and DHS, along with other responsible federal officials, are tested in rigorous tests and exercises. Likewise, DHS should continue to work with other federal agencies and private sector members of the critical infrastructure coordinating councils to help address the challenges of coordination and clarify roles and responsibilities of federal and state governments. DHS and HHS should also, in coordination with other federal agencies, continue to work with states and local governments to help them address identified gaps in their pandemic planning. Moreover, the 3-year period covered by the National Pandemic Implementation Plan is now over and it will be important for HSC to establish a process for updating the National Pandemic Implementation Plan so that the updated plan can address the gaps we have identified, as well as lessons learned from the current H1N1 outbreak. Finally, greater monitoring and reporting of agencies’ progress in plans to protect their workers during a pandemic are needed to insure the readiness of agencies to continue operations while protecting their employees in the event of a pandemic.

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