I mean, their whole raison d'etre is to manage disease outbreaks, and at the start of the outbreak they were caught with neither basic supplies (PPE, respirators, etc) nor plans for provisioning the same. They also tried to roll their own tests which proved faulty and labor-intensive rather than using the WHO standard tests (though as luck would have it, testing capacity doesn't seem to have been a strong predictor of success in combatting the virus). So I'm not entirely surprised that the CDC is struggling to communicate effectively during this outbreak.

I have the board game "pandemic" which came out some years before COVID, and I remember thinking about how cool the CDC was, as though it was one of the few agencies that had its shit somewhat together (the only other which springs to mind is NASA though no doubt NASA also has its share of mismanagement). Boy was I wrong.