Ebola czar Ron Klain has snubbed an invitation to testify before a House committee examining how the government is responding to the outbreak of the deadly disease, according to reports.
The White House has told the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee that Klain will not appear at the hearing Friday,
Fox News reported, citing a committee aide.
"The White House has informed us that he has not yet officially started and will not be able to attend Friday," the committee aide told the network.
Klain, a former chief of staff to Vice President Joe Biden and former Vice President Al Gore, would have faced a series of tough questions from the Republican-controlled committee.
Klain also skipped two Ebola meetings last week, chaired by President Barack Obama, in the first two days after he was named as the government’s point man in the crisis, the
Daily Mail reported.
The first meeting was Friday, just hours before Klain was sighted entering the White House at 5:30 p.m. The second meeting, involving 20 high-level officials, came on Saturday evening after the president had finished a round of golf.
White House Deputy Press Secretary Eric Schultz implied that Klain was not fully prepared to participate in the committee hearing because he is only officially starting his position Wednesday, according to the Mail.
"'That will be Day 3 of his tenure," said Schultz of Klain, a venture capitalist.
Officials from the Defense and Health and Human Services departments are scheduled to testify at the hearing.
The Democratic-controlled Senate is not planning to hold its first hearing on the epidemic until after Election Day, the Mail said.
Klain’s appointment as Ebola chief has been met with a round of anger by conservatives in Congress, including Texas Sen. Ted Cruz.
"Mr. Klain is not a doctor; he's not a health care professional,"
Cruz said Sunday on CNN's "State of the Union" show. "He doesn't have background in these issues.
"We don't need a White House political operative, which is what Mr. Klain has been. What we need is presidential leadership. The person who needs to be on top of this is the president of the United States," Cruz said.
"We should be less concerned about giving the public the feeling that the government is on top of this, and more concerned about the government actually being on top of it."
And Georgia Rep. Tom Price said, "That the president chose a political operative rather than a healthcare expert to head up his administration’s response to an outbreak of a deadly disease says a lot — and nothing positive — about the White House’s line of thinking."