Consider the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Founded in 1946 as the Communicable Disease Center under the Truman administration, the agency was established in Atlanta to fight the malaria endemic across the region. It is one of the world’s premiere health protection agencies, not just America’s.
The agency and its scientists have been sidelined by the Donald Trump administration during the worst pandemic in a century. Nearly 4 million cases of COVID-19 have been reported worldwide and 275,000 deaths (as of this moment per Johns Hopkins).
Politico reported Thursday that detailed CDC advice to local leaders on how to safely reopen public spaces has been shelved by the White House. One CDC official not authorized to speak with the press told the Associated Press that CDC colleagues heard the 17-page report scheduled for release May 1 “would never see the light of day.” Nonetheless, AP obtained an unauthorized copy from a second federal official.
Politico continues:
Traditionally, it’s been the CDC’s role to give the public and local officials guidance and science-based information during public health crises. During this one, however, the CDC has not had a regular, pandemic-related news briefing in nearly two months. CDC Director Dr. Robert Redfield has been a member of the White House coronavirus task force, but largely absent from public appearances.
The dearth of real-time, public information from the nation’s experts has struck many current and former government health officials as dangerous.
The administration quashed the “touchstone document” containing “detailed advice for making site-specific decisions related to reopening schools, restaurants, summer camps, churches, day care centers and other institutions” because it wants governors to make reopening decisions themselves.
Trump’s reelection sales pitch has been to take credit for an economy already on the upswing when he took office. With the economy now in the toilet and unemployment numbers rivaling the Great Depression, Trump needs scapegoats for failed containment efforts that this week made the White House campus itself a coronavirus ward. Facing intense criticism, Trump “has settled into a messaging routine: deflect, reject and minimize.” That includes burying government projections and data that spotlight his failures, and cutting off funding to the World Health Organization.
But the CDC is not the only federal agency to fall victim to political pressures, writes Charles Seife at Slate. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) have had their stars tarnished by political pressures over decades. Internal weaknesses are simply more visible during a crisis, he explains. Standards have slipped to accommodate commercial interests:
Not all American government agencies are internationally recognized for their excellence, but the ones that are have a lot in common. They attempt to base their decisions on scientific or engineering data or, at the very least, objective criteria that leave little wiggle room for political interference. They invite scrutiny; a high degree of transparency keeps them from departing from their standards on the fly. And above all, they maintain and nurture a pool of expert staff that is as good as or better than anything one can find in the commercial sector on a scale that no private company could ever hope to match. These are the attributes that make an institution healthy enough to resist the crushing political pressure that bears on all high-stakes regulatory agencies.
Faced with and administration that rejects science and regulation as well as accountability, federal agencies from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to the U.S. Postal Service to the Department of Justice have had their missions compromised to serve Trump’s whims.
Transparency itself is under attack. The Trump administration has asked the U.S. Supreme Court to to prevent the Department of Justice from releasing grand jury testimony in special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ordered the documents released in March. The D.C. court ruled the documents belong to the court and not to Justice.
Seife adds:
I’ve had to take the FDA to court to get it to release certain basic information about clinical trials—information that its European sister agency, the EMA, releases as a matter of course—deeming the records confidential. In-house experts are gainsaid by leadership or even made entirely irrelevant as their duties are passed off to the commercial sector. The FAA was dependent on Boeing employees to vouch for the 737 Max rather than independently verifying the plane’s safety itself. The FDA’s dependence on test manufacturers to vouch for the accuracy of its coronavirus tests is unlikely to have much better results.
As once-respected federal agencies come increasingly under the thumb of Trump and his White House ideologues, the world looks on with pity and dismay. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reports, “observers from the Asia Pacific to Europe expressed incredulity, amusement and sadness at President Donald Trump’s briefings on the virus, saying they are deeply damaging to the US image abroad.” Instead of leading the global fight, Trump has not just abandoned it to focus on his reelection, he’s making things worse. The White House now skips international meetings convened to develop a coronavirus vaccine.
Trump’s non-leadership is “stranger than fiction,” says Thomas Gomart, director of the Paris-based French Institute of International Relations.
“The way we look at Trump, it was a lot of fun at first,” Spanish journalist Javier del Pino said. “It’s not funny anymore.”
In fact, it’s deadly.
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Note: The pandemic will upend standard field tactics in 2020. If enough promising “improvisations” come my way by June, perhaps I can issue a COVID-19 supplement.