Day: April 5, 2020
The long catalog of mistakes
This is to give you a point of comparison for what follows:
It’s hard to say anything that isn’t obvious about the corona virus epidemic. But it may be useful to reiterate that the Trump Administration repeatedly took decisions that made the US more vulnerable, that have killed about 10,000 Americans, and ultimately will kill a lot more.
This began well before the epidemic, when some bright spark last summer cancelled a program intended to give early warning of new viruses coming from China and continued in the cancellation of two other Obama-era initiatives to speed manufacture of surgical face masks and make them reusable. After the epidemic started, the catalog of dysfunction, mistakes, cockeyed priorities, and malfeasance is truly extraordinary.
This email arrived uninvited but quite welcome in my inbox last week from a still unknown source:
January 11, 2017
“Anthony S. Fauci, MD, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said there is ‘no doubt’ Donald J. Trump will be confronted with a surprise infectious disease outbreak during his presidency.”
January 13, 2017
Outgoing members of the Obama Administration walked Trump’s team through their pandemic playbook. Rather than following the playbook, the Trump Administration would wing it, fail miserably, and blame Obama.
February 1, 2018
Trump’s CDC announced plans to cut its efforts to fight global pandemics by 80%, scaling back operations in the world’s hot spots for emerging infectious disease, including removing personnel from China.
February 13, 2018
The US Intelligence Community released its annual intelligence assessment identifying coronaviruses as “having pandemic potential if they were to acquire efficient human-to-human transmissibility.”
May 2018
Trump’s National Security Advisor, John Bolton, guts the NSC’s pandemic unit and fires the NSC’s pandemic expert leaving the position vacant and never filling it.
August 2018
Trump is warned that his tariffs on Chinese goods will lead to a shortage in medical equipment due to most such equipment coming from China. Trump ignored the warning and imposed the tariffs, creating the exact shortage he was warned of.
January-August, 2019
The Trump Administration ran a pandemic simulation called Crimson Contagion, resulting in a report concluding that the Administration was woefully unprepared for a pandemic, including being short of PPE. Nothing was done to fix it.
July 2019
Trump eliminated a key American public health position in Beijing intended to help detect disease outbreaks in China, leaving the US without an observer on the ground in the most likely spot in the world to spark a global pandemic.
October 2019
Trump shut down the US Agency for International Development’s “PREDICT” project to track and research potential pandemic diseases, a move widely panned as making the world more vulnerable to a pandemic.
January-February 2020
Trump received intelligence briefings throughout January and February warning that coronavirus was likely to result in a global pandemic, but maintained publicly that the pandemic was completely contained.
January 11, 2020
China published the coronavirus genome allowing tests to be developed. While South Korea was able to roll out widespread testing in early February 2020, Trump’s CDC would be unable to produce a reliable test until late March.
January-February 2020
Trump’s CDC declined to copy the WHO coronavirus test and created its own faulty test, leaving the US without testing until late March and losing the chance of containment. Trump’s FDA also hampered private test development efforts.
January 22, 2020
Trump told a reporter he was not concerned about the coronavirus becoming a pandemic and said it was completely under control.
January 22-March 10, 2020
Trump repeatedly downplayed the seriousness of the global pandemic in public statements, conditioning the US population not to take it seriously. To this day, large swaths of the public believe social distancing is unnecessary.
January 2020
Without wearing PPE, Trump’s HHS employees entered a hangar where coronavirus evacuees were being received at an Air Force base in California, and then moved freely on and off the base, likely sparking the spread of the virus in California.
January 31, 2020
Trump banned foreign nationals who had been to China from entering the US, but allowed US citizens to travel daily to and from China resulting in hundreds of people entering the US from China each day with no screening or testing.
February 5, 2020
Trump overrode the CDC and ordered that 14 passengers infected with the coronavirus be flown home in a plane full of uninfected people.
February 5, 2020
Trump received a request from HHS Secretary Azar for $2 billion to buy respirator masks and other supplies for the national stockpile, but Trump supplied only 25% of the requested funds.
February 7, 2020
While downplaying the seriousness of the pandemic and knowing the US’s strategic reserves were insufficient to combat a global pandemic, Trump facilitated the transportation of 17.8 tons of privately donated medical equipment to China.
February 24, 2020
Trump attempted to manipulate the stock market stating that it is “starting to look very good,” despite later claiming to know at the time of his statement that the world faced a serious pandemic that would surely destroy the US economy.
February 26, 2020
Despite being an antivaxxer and knowing that it would take over a year to develop a vaccine, Trump claimed the coronavirus was “a little like the regular flu…and we’ll essentially have a flu shot for this, in a fairly quick manner.”
February 28, 2020
Due to CDC and other agency pronouncements undermining Trump’s attempts to downplay the seriousness of the virus, Trump muzzled all federal agencies by requiring Pence to approve all coronavirus communications before dissemination.
March 4, 2020
Trump’s HHS admitted the US only had 1% of face masks needed for “full-blown” coronavirus pandemic.
March 7-8, 2020
Trump took a golf trip to Palm Beach and Mar-a-Lago, knowing that coronavirus was continuing to spread unchecked in the United States.
March 2020
Trump’s refusal to implement the Defense Production Act and coordinate procurement of medical equipment for states forced them to bid against each other, creating delays and price gouging that hampered attempts to contain and combat the virus.
March 18, 2020
Trump finally signed executive order on the Defense Production Act to address massive shortages in PPE and ventilators across the US. Trump would spend the next 9 days saying he wouldn’t invoke the DPA and would only use it as “leverage.”
March 20, 2020
Trump promoted unproven drug treatments as if they were miracle cures.
March 21, 2020
Despite having known about the pandemic for months and having already sent 17.8 tons of strategic pandemic reserves to China, Trump launched an orchestrated campaign to accuse China of covering up the global pandemic.
March 24, 2020
Trump threatened to withhold federal funding from states that were critical of his handling of the pandemic.
March 24-25, 2020
Trump floated the idea of terminating all social distancing and allowing the coronavirus to ravage the country.
March 26, 2020
Trump claimed U.S. States Don’t Need the Amount of Ventilators They’re Asking for: “I Don’t Believe You Need 40,000 or 30,000”
March 28, 2020
Trump sent California 170 broken ventilators.
March 28, 2020
Trump said he had a slush fund of $500 billion that he can dole out to himself and to corporations, and that he can simply ignore the limits placed by Congress on how he can spend the money.
It is far from an exaggeration to say that Donald Trump and his administration of incompetents have done more damage to the United States than even George W’s invasion of Iraq. It is hard to picture how they could have done much worse, except that the President by advocating a return to work by Easter illustrated how easy it is for him.
Trump had already undermined foreign confidence in American leadership by denigrating our alliances, mistreating our allies, cozying up to dictators, and pulling the plug on major international agreements. Now he has demonstrated that Washington cannot even handle a public health crisis with a modicum of competence. Who would want to follow a country that is well on its way to posting among the highest per capita infection and death rates from Covid-19? Who would want to be allied with a country that diverts medical supplies manufactured in third countries away from those who have paid for them and instead to the US? Who would respect an American president who can’t tell the truth or express any regret for his multitudinous mistakes?
The damage to American prestige and influence will be monumental. We may recover economically in a year or two, but restoring America’s standing in the world will take much longer. Foreigners might have expected global leadership against Covid-19 from the United States. What they got instead was egotistical bumbling and shirking of responsibility, not to mention unwillingness to be modestly kind in dealing with adversaries like Iran or even allies like Germany. The stupidity of calling the virus “Chinese” when so much the American medical supply chain lies in China was mindbending.
The United States has an opportunity to begin to fix this mess on November 3. Let’s all pray for the welfare of our fellow citizens and a clear repudiation of failed and deadly leadership.
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Stevenson’s army, April 5
One of the recurrent criticisms of the Trump administration is for its disdain for career professionals and rejection of their advice. Early on, Michael Lewis wrote a prescient book, The FIfth RIsk, warning of the loss of competent officials. The president has also failed even to nominate people for key positions, leaving agencies hollowed out and under timid “actings.” Then the pandemic hit.
– WaPo describes “70 days of denial and dysfunction.” But it wasn’t just the president’s delay in acting and contradictory statements. The article shows that the interagency group dealing with the coronavirus spent January worrying about stopping travel from China except for evacuating Americans; the CDC spent February protecting its bureaucratic prerogatives while bungling the testing kits.
– A new AP report says: A review of federal purchasing contracts by The Associated Press shows federal agencies waited until mid-March to begin placing bulk orders of N95 respirator masks, mechanical ventilators and other equipment needed by front-line health care workers.
– BTW, NYT calculates that 430,000 people have flown to the US on direct flights from China since the virus was made known, 40,000 of them since Trump’s travel ban, and they got scattershot screening.
– Just over the horizon is the next big challenge for the US government: executing the generous laws Congress has passed for public health expansion and economic support. Can the hollowed out administration do its job? A historian tells how FDR rose to the challenge.
– WSJ says 29% of US economy has gone idle.
My SAIS colleague Charlie Stevenson distributes this almost daily news digest of foreign/defense/national security policy to “Stevenson’s army” via Googlegroups. I plan to republish here. To get Stevenson’s army by email, send a blank email (no subject or text in the body) to stevensons-army+subscribe@googlegroups.com. You’ll get an email confirming your join request. Click “Join This Group” and follow the instructions to join. Once you have joined, you can adjust your email delivery preferences (if you want every email or a digest of the emails).
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