AMERICA MUST NOW WORK, JUST TO SURVIVE UNDER THIS PRESIDENCY

…This Prime Minister, Angela Merkel of Germany, has properly dealt with the Coronavirus

There is no US national emergency system for providing new supplies of medical masks, ventilators, gloves or gowns fast.

It’s time that all Americans must look the facts in the eye and recognize an uncomfortable reality. The United States is on a track to have the worst outbreak of the coronavirus among all the wealthy countries, largely because of the ineffectiveness of its president and his administration. Is this the face of what Trump’s calls our “exceptionalism”?

The United States now has the highest number of cases of covid-19 in the world.  This is more than both China and Italy. The first line of defense against the disease was supposed to be our “testing”. On this key issue, the US experience has been a total fiasco.  Because of this administration, we started late, then we used a faulty test, and we have never quite recovered.

Trump’s claim that “anybody that wants a test can get a test,” that has been an extremely cruel hoax. Access to tests is much worse than in most advanced countries. Trump’s assertion that the United States has tested more people than South Korea is total B.S. because it doesn’t take into account that South Korea has less than one-sixth America’s population.  Per capita, as of last Wednesday, South Korea has done five times more testing than the United States. But forget about South Korea.  Italy, a country not known for the smooth workings of its government, has tested four times as many per capita as the United States.

The United States has shortages of everything.  That includes ventilators, masks, gloves, and gowns.  There is no national emergency system to provide new supplies fast.  Even New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) says his state will need 40,000 beds for critical care.  They only have 3,000 beds.  Of course, that means many patients will probably die, simply because they lack access to care that would be available under normal circumstances.  Not three weeks into this pandemic, health-care workers are already reusing masks, sewing their own masks and pleading for donations of masks, as they also use large, plastic trash bags for their gowns.  In a searing essay in the Atlantic magazine, Ed Yong writes, “Rudderless, blindsided, lethargic, and uncoordinated, America has mishandled the COVID-19 crisis to a substantially worse degree than what every health expert I’ve spoken with had feared.”

So, why did this happen?  It’s easy to blame Trump, and the president has been totally inept and ignorant from the start.  However, there is a much larger story behind this fiasco. The United States is paying the price today for this administration’s defunding government agencies, politicizing those same government agencies, while demeaning and disparaging government workers and its bureaucrats.

America has historically prized effective government. In Federalist 70, Alexander Hamilton wrote, “A government ill executed, whatever it may be in theory, must be, in practice, a bad government.” President Franklin Roosevelt created the modern federal bureaucracy, which was very lean and efficient.  However, as the government has increased, the bureaucracy has been starved and made increasingly dysfunctional. In the 1950s, the percentage of federal civilian employees compared with total employment was just above 5%. It has dropped to under 2% today, despite a population that is twice as large and a gross domestic product (GDP) that is seven times higher.

Federal agencies are understaffed and overburdened with mountains of regulations and politicized government rules.  This gives the officials little power and ability to make reasonable decisions. The Food and Drug Administration’s cumbersome rules, which have proved a huge problem in this particular case, are just one example of the problem. The scholar who has long studied this topic, Paul Light, has noted that under President John Kennedy, the Cabinet departments had 17 “layers” of functionality.  When Trump took office, there were a staggering 71 layers.  The president’s ineptness has only increased the problem.  Both of the political parties have contributed to the problem, making the federal government a caricature of bureaucratic inefficiency.

According to those experts of government structure, they have said for years that these dysfunctions are also replicated at the state and local levels. The challenge of creating a national strategy is complicated by the reality that the true power in public health lies within the thousands of state & local systems.  Each of these groups jealously guards its independence.

We like to celebrate American government as a flourishing local democracy.  But this crazy patchwork authority is proving a nightmare when tackling a medical epidemic that knows no borders.  That’s where all those localities with a weak response allows the overall infection to keep spreading.  Therefore, what happens on a state’s beaches, doesn’t stay on that state’s beaches.

It’s easy to say that the United States can’t mirror China’s dictatorship.  The governments that are handling this pandemic effectively include those democracies such as South Korea, Taiwan and Germany.  Many of the best practices employed in authoritarian places such as Singapore and Hong Kong are smart.  But that is just due to their testing, contact tracing and isolation.

But all these places have governments that are well-funded, and that have proven to be efficient and responsive.

In today’s world, with problems that spill across borders at lightning speed, “well executed government” is what makes a country truly exceptional, not what our current president says.

Under this president and his administration, this administration is exactly the wrong organization to be running the greatest democracy and economy in the world.

Now, it is more important than ever for us to not to just succeed, but for us to literally survive under this presidency.

Copyright G. Ater 2020