“President Trump downplayed the coronavirus threat, was slow to move and has delivered mixed messages to the nation. The federal bureaucracy bungled rapid production of tests for the virus. Stockpiles of crucial medical materials were limited and supply lines cumbersome. States and hospitals were plunged into life-and-death competition with one another.
When the public looked to government for help, government sometimes looked helpless or frozen or contradictory — and not for the first time.
The country and its leaders were caught off guard when terrorists on hijacked airplanes attacked the homeland on Sept. 11, 2001. The financial crisis of 2008, which turned into a deep recession, forced drastic, unprecedented action by a government struggling to keep pace with the economic wreckage. The devastation from Hurricane Andrew in Florida in 1992 and Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans in 2005 exposed serious gaps in the government’s disaster response and emergency management systems.
‘We always wait for the crisis to happen,’ said Leon Panetta, who served in government as secretary of defense, director of the CIA, White House chief of staff, director of the Office of Management and Budget and a member of the House. ‘I know the human failings we’re dealing with, but the responsibility of people elected to these jobs is to make sure we are not caught unawares.’
In interviews over the past two weeks, senior officials from administrations of both parties, many with firsthand experience in dealing with major crises, suggest that the president and his administration have fallen short of nearly every standard a government should try to meet.
Leadership is important, and President Trump will have on his record what he did and didn’t do in the early stages of this particular crisis. But the problems go far broader and deeper than what a president does. Lack of planning and preparation contribute, but so too does bureaucratic inertia as well as fear among career officials of taking risks. Turnover in personnel robs government of historical knowledge and expertise. The process of policymaking-on-the-fly is less robust than it once was. Politics, too, gets in the way.
Long ago, this was far less the case, a time when the United States projected competence and confidence around the globe, said Philip Zelikow, a professor at the University of Virginia who served in five administrations and was executive director of the 9/11 Commission.
‘America had the reputation of being non-ideological, super pragmatic, problem solvers, par excellence,’ he said. ‘This image of the United States was an earned image, of people seeing America do almost a wondrous series of things. . . . We became known as the can-do country. If you contrast that with the image of the U.S. today, it’s kind of depressing.’”
The article goes on at length to explain some key events the Bush and Obama administrations faced and how the handoff of power to the president was handled. One weakness of the current administration that WaPo discusses was its refusal to appoint personnel to key positions and indifference to professional competence. WaPo comments that there are “scores” of unfilled vacancies in critical positions. Those positions tend to operate independently of a president simply because of the size and complexity of operations needed for a competent federal response.
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