The coronavirus has escaped. The U.S. has 60+ cases as of this writing, including cases that are not connected to known carriers, indicating that it has gotten loose in the population.
How big an issue this will be is as yet unknown, but what is known is how the administration has prepared for it and confronted it publicly, and the results are typically horrific.
In 2018, the Trump administration proposed 15 billion dollars in cuts to the Center for Disease Control (CDC), National Security Council (NSC), Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Health and Human Services (HHS), focusing on global disease fighting budgets. This led to the resignation of Rear Admiral Timothy Ziemer, who’s job it was to lead the country’s response to a pandemic and his team was disbanded, eliminating a unifying influence on the various government agencies with responsibilities in the case of an outbreak.
The CDC’s budget ran out reducing it’s effectiveness by 80%. The Complex Crisis Fund, a $30 million emergency pool available to the Secretary of State to address just such a crisis as we are facing was eliminated. . The fund was created by Hillary Clinton, making it a natural target for cuts by this administration.
Two years later, only three of the one hundred public-health labs are able to test for the new threat. Unable to test for the disease in a comprehensive way makes it impossible to determine the seriousness of the outbreak. We are essentially flying blind.
So what now? Well, the administration has requested $2.5 billion in emergency funds, money that would have been largely unnecessary had we maintained our vigilance in the interim. Trump saw these measures as superfluous, money being wasted on the common good, not addressing ways to make businesses even more bloated than they have become.
Too cynical? Not by half. One of the ways the administration has proposed to pay for saving the population is by cutting millions from a program that provides subsidies for low income families to provide heat in the winter.
I’m not making this up. This is Dickens territory. He has suggested that the collapse of the Dow Jones has created a dynamite opportunity for investment. He has called Covid-19 “like the flu”, has lied about the number of domestic cases and assured us that one day it will just go away, like “a miracle”. He has put Mike Pence in charge of our response, a man who as recently as 2010 was downplaying the physical effects of smoking and suggested condoms were a poor deterent to sexually transmitted diseases. His first action in his new role was to consolidate all public utterances regarding the coronavirus, requiring that it all goes through him.
It seems like it will require a miracle, because the alternative of sober leadership and a full-court coordinated effort is not in the cards. When his base swallows the lies about the evil Left ganging up on him and blaming him for no reason at all, they will finally realize that this is one adversary that simply doesn’t care at all about the politics. It doesn’t target any ideological foes, nor does it discriminate in any way. The rich, the poor, the brown and white, the gay and straight, all irrelevant.
We are united in this. We are allies, all of us.
And that makes anyone that has the responsibility for our response and is incompetent in it, or worse, duplicitous in their response for economic reasons or reasons of ego or pride is our collectve adversary.
Vote.