It seems to me that CDC is important iff there is an outbreak of a deadly epidemic.
I was thinking of more mundane things, for example the yearly flu, which kills quite a few people yearly and would kill more but for careful monitoring of strains and preventative vaccination measures.
The CDC alone isn't what I'm concerned about. It's the small-to-medium inconvenience distributed over a very large number of research facilities, and the larger inconveniences to projects which are time sensitive.
For those who haven't heard, NIH and NSF are no longer processing grants, leading to many negative downstream effects.
I've been directing my attention elsewhere lately and don't have anything informative to say about this. However, my uninformed intuition is that people who care about effective altruism (research in general, infrastructure development, X-risk mitigation, life-extension...basically everything, actually) or have transhumanist leanings should be very concerned.
The consequences have already been pretty disastrous. To provide just one, immediate example, the article says that the Center for Disease Control and Prevention has shut down. I think that this is almost certain to directly cause a nontrivial number of deaths. Each additional day that this continues could have huge negative impact down the line, perhaps delaying some key future discoveries by years. This event *might* be a small window of opportunity to prevent a lot of harm very cheaply.
So the question is:
1) Can we do anything to remedy the situation?
2) If so, is it worth doing it? (Opportunity costs, etc)