This sort of thing is the problem throughout all of government. It is not that they have no money. It is that they are misspending it.
A link to this thread has been posted on the Ebola Surveillance Thread
Cut (really cut, not trim the increase) their budget by 10% per year for a decade or two and this sort of crap will go out the window, or it will be all they do.
Actually, Ebola vaccines have been researched for at least a decade. There are several problems with researching Ebola vaccines or drugs.
First, is that there is no profit potential for Ebola treatments or vaccines. Until the current outbreak (which grew because of inadequate public health measures), there have never been enough patients to even test on, let alone make a profit on. So a few government labs could work on vaccines and drugs, but the development could only go so far.
Even if pharmaceutical companies could be persuaded to take on producing these drugs and vaccines (by an infusion of government money), testing the drugs and vaccines in phase 3 trials—the stage where it is determined they actually work—is almost impossible. Just because a drug works in animals does not mean it will work in humans, or have the same effect. And testing in humans is problematic. You cannot intentionally infect someone with Ebola to see if a drug or vaccine works. Furthermore, when testing the drug or vaccine, a control group has to receive the standard of care plus placebo; only in this outbreak have there been a sufficient number of patients to even set up such a randomized trial, and most patients do not receive a standard of care to compare against. There are also ethical problems with giving one group a treatment the other group does not receive, when the death rate is so high.
All the money in the world cannot compensate for the real scientific, economic, and ethical issues hindering the R&D of an Ebola vaccine or drug.