\n\n“The Department of Homeland Security stopped updating its annual models of the havoc that pandemics would wreak on America\u2019s critical infrastructure in 2017, according to current and former DHS officials with direct knowledge of the matter.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
From at least 2005 to 2017, an office inside DHS, in tandem with analysts and supercomputers at several national laboratories, produced detailed analyses of what would happen to everything from transportation systems to hospitals if a pandemic hit the United States.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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” the work abruptly stopped in 2017 amid a bureaucratic dispute over its value, two of the former officials said, leaving the department flat-footed as it seeks to stay ahead of the impacts the COVID-19 outbreak is having on vast swathes of the U.S. economy. Officials at other agencies have requested some of the reports from the pandemic modeling unit at DHS in recent days, only to find the information they needed scattered or hard to find quickly.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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“\u201cA lot of what we\u2019re doing now is shooting in the dark, and there\u2019s going to be secondary impacts to infrastructure that are going to be felt in part because we didn\u2019t maintain these models,\u201d said one of the former DHS officials. \u201cOur ability to potentially foresee where the impacts are or may manifest is a result of the fact that we don\u2019t have the capabilities anymore.\u201d”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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” Much of the blame for the switch in focus at DHS, according to two of the former officials, falls on longtime DHS employee Robert Hanson, who became division director of prioritization and modeling at the department\u2019s Office of Cyber and Infrastructure Analysis (OCIA) in May 2016.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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“Hanson wanted to focus more on visualizations of events like hurricanes and \u201cgoing down rabbit holes that really didn\u2019t need to be done,\u201d according to one of the former officials. He also wanted to focus more on elections and cybersecurity because \u201ccyber is the magic word to attract money,\u201d said the other former official.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThey\u2019ve allowed a lot of capability to decay, including the pandemic models and transportation models and a whole bunch of other stuff in favor of chasing the soccer ball on different cyber things,\u201d including trying to use machine learning and AI in work on cybersecurity, this person said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In an interview, Hanson acknowledged decreasing some funding away from pandemic modeling to other topics of research because he had \u201cbeen given direction by my leadership at the time to reprioritize a lot of the projects,\u201d and he agreed it was necessary. He also said that when he took over the modeling program, it was considered \u201cineffective\u201d by DHS leadership and by executive branch overseers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Hanson thought, too, that pandemic modeling was best done by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the former DHS officials said, although the CDC\u2019s mandate is different and researchers there don\u2019t focus on how a pandemic could affect non-health related infrastructure.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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“It wouldn\u2019t be easy for DHS to rebuild its capacity to model pandemics, given the brain drain within the department: Many of the people who worked on the models have now scattered across the government or left government service altogether, one of the former officials said.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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“current officials are left essentially to reinvent the wheel in the middle of a pandemic”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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” \u201cI\u2019ve heard people say it\u2019s a black swan. It\u2019s not a black swan,\u201d said one of the former DHS officials. \u201cThis is the whitest of white swans. This was absolutely inevitable, and the fact is we didn\u2019t even maintain the capacity that we had or even the records of what we had done so that information could be quickly located and turned over to people who are making the critical operations right now.\u201d”<\/p>\n\n\n\n