30 JULY-AUGUST 2025 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL in activities that support reaching those targets, the U.S. government is helping countries speed up and maintain core functions that mitigate hits to their health systems and ours. This approach of investing to support national plans allows governments to take accountability and ownership of how they ultimately maintain health security capacities in the future, strategically leveraging partnerships to fill tailored gaps. 2. Maintain robust technical expertise and diplomatic capacity across the federal workforce. Across federal agencies, the U.S. maintains world-renowned scientists, epidemiologists, logisticians, and emergency managers. While agencies go through restructuring or mergers, the U.S.’s ability to support countries in preventing and containing diseases, while also maintaining adequate readiness for our domestic health system, is centered on maintaining a well-equipped workforce. Ensuring technical experts and diplomats also maintain incountry presence across regions is critical to sustaining trust and reliability among partner governments. 3. Ensure robust U.S. government capabilities to support outbreak detection and response. In numerous outbreaks, the deployment of new tools, such as diagnostics and vaccines, significantly mitigate further transmission. These tools, often showcasing the ingenuity of American innovation and research, are critical to containing outbreaks and promoting partnerships with the American private sector. Similarly, the U.S. government has maintained global stockpiles of personal protective equipment, rostered public health and emergency response experts, and maintained accelerated grantmaking functions to rapidly respond to outbreaks when they occur. From research and development to deployment capabilities, it is in the interest of Americans for these investments to continue. These efforts contain diseases before they come to the U.S., inform our own preparedness, and allow us to monitor and deploy tools to respond to health threats. Doing so makes the world a safer place and protects Americans at home and abroad. It helps us put America first. n
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy ODIyMDU=