Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell in 2017 repeatedly tried to defund a critical program at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention directed at detecting and curbing the spread of infectious diseases, The New Yorker reported.

As Republicans were working to repeal the Affordable Care Act, McConnell introduced an amendment to ax the Prevention and Public Health Fund, which assists states in detecting and preventing the spread of infectious diseases.

The New Yorker reported that almost two-thirds of the fund's money goes to state and local health departments, including a program in McConnell's home state of Kentucky.

McConnell and other Republicans tried again to gut the program after their push to repeal the ACA failed in 2017, but most of the fund ultimately survived.

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Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell tried in 2017 to defund a critical program at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention directed at detecting and curbing the spread of infectious diseases, The New Yorker reported.

The effort came as Republicans were working once again to repeal the Affordable Care Act. The GOP has tried to dismantle the law at least 60 times, and they've so far been unsuccessful at it. During one attempt in 2017, McConnell introduced an amendment to ax the Prevention and Public Health Fund at the CDC, which assists states in detecting and preventing the spread of infectious diseases, according to The New Yorker.

The program receives about $1 billion a year and makes up more than 12% of the CDC's annual budget. The New Yorker reported that almost two-thirds of the fund's money went to state and local health departments, including a program in Kentucky, McConnell's home state, directed at curbing infectious diseases.

The GOP's push to eliminate Obamacare that year ultimately failed when then-Arizona Sen. John McCain dramatically voted down the measure in a highly anticipated Senate floor vote. The New Yorker reported that McConnell and other Republican lawmakers later tried to cut the CDC's fund, but most of the program ultimately survived.

Republican efforts to defund critical public-health programs have attracted renewed scrutiny in recent months as the novel coronavirus has surged throughout the US.

The World Health Organization declared the virus, which causes a disease known as COVID-19, a pandemic on March 11. To date, 1,870,076 people around the world have been infected, and 116,052 have died.

The outbreak originated in China last year, but the US recently became its global center. As of Monday morning, the US had 558,526 confirmed cases of the disease and 22,116 deaths.

The Trump administration has been criticized for slashing public-health programs, failing to conduct early rigorous testing to detect and contain the disease's spread, and ignoring multiple warnings from intelligence officials and government agencies of an impending pandemic.

President Donald Trump has also failed to maintain a consistent message as the US grapples with the outbreak.

He initially downplayed the risk of the coronavirus, insisting it was no more dangerous than the flu and that the US was well-prepared to handle it.

As the disease gained a stronger foothold in the country in mid-March, Trump acknowledged the severity of the crisis and said he "felt it was a pandemic long before it was called a pandemic."

He pivoted to focus on the economy late last month and said the US would "be open for business" again "very soon," despite public-health officials saying that preemptively lifting stay-at-home orders would exacerbate the outbreak. But Trump doubled down, saying, "We cannot let the cure be worse than the problem itself."

The president has struck a more measured tone in recent days as Republican lawmakers have urged him to step back from spearheading the daily White House coronavirus briefings and allow scientific experts to take the stage, according to The New York Times.