Newly appointed Ebola czar Ron Klain may not be ready for the position if he wasn't able to appear before Congress and answer basic questions about the government's response to the threat the disease posed to the country, said Rep. Jason Chaffetz.
Klain, who was scheduled to begin working Wednesday, will not testify before a congressional committee on Friday, the White House announced on Tuesday.
Chaffetz, a Utah Republican who is a member of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee that scheduled the hearing, told Fox News' "America's Newsroom" he didn't know why Klain would not appear, and said it indicated "we're off to a bad start."
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"If he doesn't feel comfortable answering very basic questions from Congress, is he really ready to be up on the job when it's happening in real time right now?" Chaffetz said Wednesday.
Chaffetz said some lawmakers questioned "whether or not [Klain] should actually be in that spot," and said Congress needed answers about the budget for the effort, what the government's response was going to be, and what other agencies were "set up to deal with this."
Chaffetz maintained it was a "legitimate question" why President Barack Obama didn't task Acting Surgeon General Rear Adm. Boris Lushniak with heading up the government's response to the Ebola crisis, and said "it kind of begs the question as to what does the surgeon general do?"
"You've got somebody who has a medical history background, expertise, who understands the bureaucracy. Why aren't we empowering that person?
"I don't understand why the Obama administration is doing it this way, but they chose somebody who is political, and not somebody who is actually a doctor. And that's a concern," he said.
Both former Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush had set up a "special assistant to the president for bio-defense policy" to address similar issues, Chaffetz explained, but said it was a position Obama eliminated.
Chaffetz said he wanted "a doctor telling me how to deal with this," adding he didn't know "what [Klain] understands medically."