“It began in April 2018 — more than a year and a half before the SARS-CoV-2 virus and the disease it causes, Covid-19, sickened enough people in China that authorities realized they were dealing with a new disease.
The Trump administration, with John Bolton newly at the helm of the White House National Security Council, began dismantling the team in charge of pandemic response, firing its leadership and disbanding the team in spring 2018.
The cuts, coupled with the administration’s repeated calls to cut the budget for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and other public health agencies, made it clear that the Trump administration wasn’t prioritizing the federal government’s ability to respond to disease outbreaks.
That lack of attention to preparedness, experts say, helps explain why the Trump administration has botched its response to the coronavirus pandemic.”
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“Several weeks after the first community transmission within the US, the country has tested more than 16,000 people as of March 13, according to the Covid Tracking Project. By comparison, South Korea had tested more than 66,000 people within a week of its first case of community transmission.”
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“Testing is crucial to slowing epidemics. First, it lets public health officials identify sick people and subsequently isolate them. Second, they can trace that sick person’s recent contacts to make sure those people aren’t sick and to get them into quarantine as well. It’s one of the best tools we have for an outbreak like this.”
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“it’s the kind of thing that the Trump administration has screwed up, while instead trying to downplay the threat of Covid-19. Trump himself has tweeted comparisons of Covid-19 to the common flu — which Jha describes as “really unhelpful,” because the novel coronavirus appears to be much worse. Trump also called concerns about the virus a “hoax.” He said on national television that, based on nothing more than a self-admitted “hunch,” the death rate of the disease is much lower than public health officials projected.
And Trump has rejected any accountability for the botched testing process: “I don’t take responsibility at all,” he said on Friday.”
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“In April 2018, Bolton fired Tom Bossert, then the homeland security adviser, who, the Washington Post reported, “had called for a comprehensive biodefense strategy against pandemics and biological attacks.” Then, that May, Bolton let go the head of pandemic response, Rear Adm. Timothy Ziemer, and his global health security team. The team, the Directorate for Global Health Security and Biodefense, was never replaced.”
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“Since the federal government is sprawling and large, it helps to have centralized leadership in case of a crisis. That leadership could ensure all federal agencies are doing the most they can and working toward a single set of goals.”
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“it’s important to have this kind of agency set up before an outbreak. Setting up an agency takes time; it requires hiring staff, handing out tasks and expected workloads, creating internal policies, and so on. A preexisting agency is also going to have plans worked out before an outbreak, with likely contingencies in place for what to do. That’s why it was so important to have this agency in place even during years, like 2018, when disease pandemics didn’t seem like a nearby threat to everyone.”
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“By repeatedly undercutting outbreak preparedness, Jha said, the Trump administration signaled “to the government and all the agencies this is not a priority. And that means that even other agencies end up not putting as much attention and energy on it. So I think this has been a longstanding problem of the White House.”
Trump, for his part, has defended his record, arguing, “I’m a businessperson. I don’t like having thousands of people around when you don’t need them. When we need them, we can get them back very quickly.”
But experts argue that’s not how pandemic preparedness should work. “You build a fire department ahead of time,” Tom Inglesby, director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, told the Washington Post. “You don’t wait for a fire.””
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“Not all of this is necessarily the Trump administration’s fault. When the CDC rolled out its tests, a component in them turned out to be faulty. That was unfortunate, but it put a big spotlight on the CDC’s decision to use its own test kit instead of test kits other countries have used, reportedly in an effort to create a more accurate test.”
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“But this is exactly the kind of situation that proper preparedness, well, prepares federal agencies for. If the Trump administration had prioritized outbreak prevention before the coronavirus pandemic, it might have used the time prior to Covid-19’s appearance — or even January and February, when the global threat was increasingly clear — to establish contingencies in case something went wrong.”
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“This is, after all, something the federal government has done before for outbreaks, from H1N1 to Zika. A big difference from then to now is that Trump is in charge.”
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“Trump has consistently downplayed the coronavirus, comparing it to the common flu and claiming that his administration is doing a “GREAT job” and keeping things under control. Even on Friday, when announcing his administration’s goal to get 5 million test kits out, Trump said, “I doubt we’ll need anywhere near that.”
Some of that may be political. Politico reporter Dan Diamond told NPR host Terry Gross that, based on his own reporting, Trump “did not push to do aggressive additional testing in recent weeks, and that’s partly because more testing might have led to more cases being discovered of coronavirus outbreak, and the president had made clear — the lower the numbers on coronavirus, the better for the president, the better for his potential re-election this fall.”
Some of it could also be a result of too much optimism. Trump in February said of the coronavirus, “One day it’s like a miracle, it will disappear.” (As of March 13, the US has nearly 2,000 confirmed cases, up from fewer than 100 at the beginning of the month, according to Johns Hopkins University.)
The administration more broadly seems to have underestimated the threat, requesting $2.5 billion in emergency funding for the crisis — a fraction of what both Democrats and Republicans said is necessary and ultimately passed.”
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“What Trump has done is focus on travel restrictions, first against China and most recently against most of Europe. While this likely bought the US a little time with China, the Trump administration didn’t use that time properly.
And in the case of Europe, the restrictions will likely do little to nothing. There’s one simple reason for that, Kates told me: “The virus is already here.” Since the coronavirus is already spreading within communities, the concern is no longer the virus coming in from outside the US.
Even conservatives have been critical of Trump’s response. The National Review editorial board wrote:
“[Trump] resisted making the response to the epidemic a priority for as long as he could — refusing briefings, downplaying the problem, and wasting precious time. He has failed to properly empower his subordinates and refused to trust the information they provided him — often offering up unsubstantiated claims and figures from cable television instead. He has spoken about the crisis in crude political and personal terms. He has stood in the way of public understanding of the plausible course of the epidemic, trafficking instead in dismissive clichés. He has denied his administration’s missteps, making it more difficult to address them.””
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“On Wednesday night, Trump appeared to finally confront the reality of the crisis in a televised statement from the Oval Office”
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“The speech was also riddled with errors, leading the administration and others to later issue several corrections”
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“Trump on Friday declared a national emergency, which will unlock billions of dollars in disaster aid to help combat the virus. The administration previously declared a public health emergency in January, but that didn’t tap into as much money as the new declaration under the 1988 Stafford Act”
“The Food and Drug Administration has a protocol called emergency use authorization, or EUA, through which it clears tests from labs around the country for use in an outbreak. Getting more of these tests up and running would greatly increase the capacity of doctors and public-health officials to screen patients for the coronavirus.
Former FDA officials I spoke with said that during past outbreaks, EUAs could be granted in just a couple of days. But this time, the requirements for getting an EUA were so complicated that it would have taken weeks to receive one..clinical labs were not allowed to begin testing at all before they had received the EUA, even if they had already internally made sure their tests worked. Though these regulations are in place to ensure that faulty lab tests don’t get used on patients, several microbiologists told me they felt the precautions were excessive for a fast-moving outbreak of this scale.”
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““Labs and companies need samples of the virus itself in order to make their tests, but delays in getting access to samples further slowed down the test-development process. The coronavirus originated in China, and as several microbiologists told me, the Chinese government does not allow specimens to be shipped outside its borders.”
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“Even when working with nonauthoritarian countries, a combination of government processes, researcher reticence, complex shipping regulations, and patient-privacy concerns makes getting samples difficult for diagnostic companies like his.”
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““Even though some hospitals actually have the new, functional CDC tests, the extraction machines and reagents that are used to perform them are in short supply.”
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“For months, President Trump has made light of the coronavirus, telling attendees at a Black History Month reception, for instance, that perhaps the virus could miraculously disappear. He claimed on Twitter that the U.S. has done a “great job” handling the outbreak. Such a cavalier attitude seems unlikely to have motivated health officials to take things seriously.”
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“Containing a new infectious disease requires a lot of close collaboration between the president, the CDC, the FDA, and other parts of the Department of Health and Human Services, several Obama-era health officials told me. “One reason we were able to move quickly [during the Ebola outbreak] was that there was a great deal of coordination and issue spotting and troubleshooting that went on,” Hamburg, the former FDA commissioner, told me.”
“For six weeks behind the scenes, and now increasingly in public, Trump has undermined his administration’s own efforts to fight the coronavirus outbreak — resisting attempts to plan for worst-case scenarios, overturning a public-health plan upon request from political allies and repeating only the warnings that he chose to hear. Members of Congress have grilled top officials like Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar and Centers for Disease Control Director Robert Redfield over the government’s biggest mistake: failing to secure enough testing to head off a coronavirus outbreak in the United States. But many current and former Trump administration officials say the true management failure was Trump’s.”
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““Interviews with 13 current and former officials, as well as individuals close to the White House, painted a picture of a president who rewards those underlings who tell him what he wants to hear while shunning those who deliver bad news.”
“the talking point the Trump administration is using to dispel concerns that Maguire’s dismissal was politically motivated doesn’t carry water.”
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“Maguire’s ouster may be part of Trump’s broader effort to get rid of government officials he perceives as being insufficiently loyal. On Sunday, Jonathan Swan reported for Axios that the Trump administration has “assembled detailed lists of disloyal government officials to oust — and trusted pro-Trump people to replace them.””
“A rule that creates new barriers to low-income immigrants seeking to enter the US went into effect on Monday, bringing to fruition the kind of vast restrictions on legal immigration that President Donald Trump has long sought.
The so-called “public charge” rule, published in August by the Department of Homeland Security, establishes a test to determine whether an immigrant applying to enter the US, extend their visa, or convert their temporary immigration status into a green card is likely to end up relying on public benefits in the future.
Immigration officials will now have more leeway to turn away those who are “likely to be a public charge” based on an evaluation of 20 factors, ranging from the use of certain public benefits programs — including food stamps, Section 8 housing vouchers, and Medicaid — to English language proficiency.”
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“Trump has justified the rule as a means of ensuring that immigrants are “financially self-sufficient” and has argued it will “protect benefits for American citizens.””
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“The rule, which has been anticipated for more than a year, has had a chilling effect already: Noncitizens have been needlessly dropping their public benefits out of fear that they will face immigration consequences. It’s difficult to quantify just how many immigrants have unenrolled already, but one survey suggested that about one in seven had done so as of 2018.
Many immigrants aren’t eligible for public benefits unless they have green cards or certain humanitarian protections — and not all public benefits are available to noncitizens.”
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“It also makes getting into the US much harder for immigrants sponsored by family members, the phenomenon Trump has excoriated as “chain migration.”
The rule is only one of several policies the Trump administration has pursued to dramatically shift which immigrants are legally able to come to the United States. Under Trump, the legal immigration system increasingly rewards skills and wealth over family ties to the US, while shutting out a growing number of people from low-income backgrounds.”
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“With the public charge regulation, Trump is painting immigrants as abusing public benefits. But they are actually “less likely to consume welfare benefits and, when they do, they generally consume a lower dollar value of benefits than native-born Americans,” according to the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank.”
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“few immigrants would end up being penalized, under the final version of the rule, for using public assistance. But the rule has already been effective in dissuading many immigrants from continuing to access the public benefits they need.”
“What we are realistically looking at now is not containment of a virus that is already on multiple continents, but efforts to mitigate the harm that it does by slowing its spread.”
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“Even with effective mitigation a lot of people get sick, but the caseload is spread out and society can continue to function.”
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“Mitigation is essentially what the world is doing now. We are slowing the spread of the disease, both from place to place and within the hardest-hit countries.”
“As part of an overall plan to divert $3.8 billion from the Pentagon to pay for the construction of a wall on the border with Mexico, President Donald Trump is planning to drain about $1.6 billion from the slush fund that pays for much of America’s post-9/11 wars in the Middle East.
Foreign Policy’s Lara Seligman reports that the White House sent a memo to Congress on Thursday outlining plans to redirect military spending for the border wall. The administration plans to move $2.2 billion originally earmarked for purchasing vehicles, ships, and aircraft into an anti-drug trafficking program that has already been tapped to provide for wall construction costs. The other $1.6 billion in border wall funding will come from the budget used to pay for America’s foreign wars”
“during Trump’s first term, he displayed the same proclivity to jack up spending as his Republicans predecessors. The data shows that Trump increased defense spending in real terms by 18 percent, with an overall spending growth rate of 10 percent. Presidents Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush increased defense spending by 28 percent and 36 percent, respectively (and overall spending by 9 percent and 24 percent). Compared with their Republican counterparts, Democratic presidents Obama and Bill Clinton look frugal.
Unlike Bush or Reagan, however, Trump has had a booming economy, no new wars, and no terrorist attacks since his term began. This context makes the massive increase in spending, along with the $1 trillion deficit in fiscal year 2020, even more shocking. With no serious changes, the Congressional Budget Office projects that these annual budget deficits will stay well above $1 trillion in the next 10 years.
To be fair, the president does plan to balance the budget eventually—in 2035. To achieve this goal, Trump proposes some $4.4 trillion in savings over 10 years, which is a step in the right direction. For instance, according to Marc Goldwein at the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, this the budget would save Medicare $600 billion, reducing national health expenditures by almost $1 trillion. As Goldwein noted on Twitter, “That means lower premiums and out of pocket costs—don’t demagogue these policies!” Unfortunately, judging by the news headlines and reactions by Democrats in Congress, these savings are likely dead on arrival.
To achieve such savings, some very unrealistic assumptions would need to materialize. For instance, while the economy grew 2.4 percent in 2017, 2.9 percent in 2018 and 2.3 percent in 2019, the White House projects that the economy will grow at about 2.8 percent annually for a decade straight. The budget also counts on interest rates staying low, so as to not massively increase the amount of interest payments that will have to be made. The low interest rate, paired with the planned savings, would lower interest costs by $300 billion. Unfortunately, this is a mirage. According to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, “Using more realistic economic assumptions, the budget deficit would be about $1.2 trillion (3.7 percent of GDP) in 2030,” as opposed to the $261 billion projected by the White House.”
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“The plan is to cut projected spending on domestic programs by roughly $2 trillion. These “cuts” are mostly to the projected growth of spending increases, not reductions in the actual amount of spending. Still, to make the savings politically viable, the burden should be distributed enough to inspire a sense of shared sacrifice. Instead, the budget plans to extend the 2017 tax cuts at a cost of $1.4 trillion and increases military spending, making the cuts harder to stomach for some.
At the end of the day, and after much spilled ink analyzing the budget proposal, we can count on one thing: This actual budget won’t see the light of day. Instead, Congress and the administration will continue in the footsteps of those who came before them and increase the debt while pretending to be fiscally responsible.”
“the president has made it clear that those who speak out against him are at risk of losing their jobs — and that Trump knows he’s unlikely to be punished for it.”