It is common in a polarized political climate to try and blame the other political party when missteps happen but most government employees are not political appointees, they are career bureaucrats, and sometimes care more about protecting their fiefdoms than in helping the public. 

A good example over the last decade has been the Centers for Disease Control, which despite adding "And Prevention" onto their name does very little of either. You have read here about their penchant for manufacturing problems they can then go to Congress and ask for new funds to combat - a pre-diabetes epidemic, a vaping epidemic in middle schoolers, an opioid epidemic that includes dying cancer patients, you name it  and CDC has gone to Congress asking for money to fight it, even if they invented it.

Biden appointee Dr. Rochelle Walensky took over the CDC and immediately engaged in the kind of political theater Democrats claimed Trump did, saying President Trump "muzzled" the group when the biggest problem the CDC had and still does is career employees who engage in theater of their own, all while being unable to do the most basic things on time. It takes them 6 weeks to tell the public lettuce is tainted with E.coli. Instead of being a public health body, the CDC is more like the DMV of disease control, except even in California, the nation's most social authoritarian state, they don't need six weeks to send me a car registration renewal, then send me one for someone's boat, and blame Republicans for that.

Last year, I wondered how much of the pandemic could have been mitigated if they hadn't played the power game - telling a UC Davis hospital they couldn't have a coronavirus test until they proved the patient had coronavirus, protesting travel bans the Trump administration wanted - but writing in real-time I didn't know the scope of the problem. When the Trump administration forced CDC to send out tests, the government agency sent out some with faulty reagents. We didn't know the scope of the problem then and most of corporate science media too busy campaigning against Republicans to bother with public health but a new paper says the problem was even worse. Because the CDC relied on the CDC to make the tests rather than the private sector who are out of business if they fail.

Once various groups told them about the false positives, CDC then had to redo everything and figure out where the problem was. The world moved on without them.

Unlike the political theater claims about CDC of 2020, the behavior of CDC is actually worse now when it comes to playing politics and engaging in power grabs. For the Biden administration, and to circumvent Congress, the CDC created a regulation saying tenants could not evict renters who refused to pay, claiming that would make the pandemic worse. That's right, they claimed they had the authority to control real estate in America to prevent disease. The courts struck it down.

Instead of making CDC important, by doing the job they claim they are vital to doing, the new CDC engages in hyperbole. Dr. Walensky exaggerated the risk of outdoor COVID-19 transmission by an order of magnitude - a misrepresentation so over the top even the epidemiologist who co-wrote the paper cited as the source complained. And you know epidemiologists love to be quoted by centralized bureaucracies. Walensky kept repeating her errors, claiming the paper was a meta-analysis when it was a systematic review (Walensky is also an MPH, so should have learned the difference in all those epidemiology classes) and getting transmission risk wrong by two orders of magnitude.

George Washington University Professor Leana Wen phrased it bluntly: "If [the CDC's] advice is too disconnected from reality, and if they are too slow, then they make themselves irrelevant."

It was hoped the pandemic would spur CDC to positive change the way it did FDA, but things don't look good, which means when the next pandemic happens, we'll be in the same place if we rely on them.