| | | Was the White House office for global pandemics eliminated?
By Glenn Kessler and
Meg Kelly
March 20, 2020 at 3:00 a.m. EDT
“The Obama-Biden Administration set up the White House National Security Council Directorate for Global Health Security and Biodefense to prepare for future pandemics like covid-19. Donald Trump eliminated it — and now we’re paying the price.”
—Former vice president Joe Biden, in a tweet, March 19
full article at washingtonpost.com
excerpt:
Several readers have written The Fact Checker, saying they were confused by dueling opinion articles that appeared in The Washington Post concerning the National Security Council office highlighted in Biden’s tweet.
On March 13, The Post published an article by Beth Cameron, a former Obama administration official, titled “I ran the White House pandemic office. Trump closed it.” She argued that “eliminating the office,” which she headed from September 2016 to March 2017, “has contributed to the federal government’s sluggish domestic response” to the coronavirus pandemic.
Three days later, The Post published an article by Tim Morrison, a former Trump administration official, titled “No, the White House didn’t ‘dissolve’ its pandemic response office. I was there.” He countered that office, which he oversaw for about a year starting in July 2018, was folded into another one to streamline a bloated organization and “the combined directorate was stronger because related expertise could be commingled.”Rearranging organizational charts and bureaucratic intrigue is part of the lifeblood of official Washington, but it can have meaningful consequences for Americans. The government works effectively when the right people are in the right place to make decisions — and the Trump administration’s stumbling response to the coronavirus suggests the government is not working as effectively as it could.
Asked at a congressional hearing on March 11 whether it was a mistake to eliminate the office, Anthony S. Fauci, who runs the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, diplomatically said: “I wouldn’t necessarily characterize it as a mistake. I would say we worked very well with that office. It would be nice if the office was still there.”Can one office really make a difference? At a news conference on March 13, President Trump dismissed this as a “nasty” question. Let’s explore.
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“A pandemic is an odd policy challenge because it straddles a lot of other things,” said Jeremy Konyndyk, who served in the Obama administration, citing global health; diplomacy; domestic health policy; border and travel controls; foreign aid; and chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear and explosive materials threats. “But it is always a subordinate priority in any of those other streams, which leads to a fragmented and disconnected policy process.”
“During the Ebola operation, we really struggled with initially a lot of kind of bifurcation within the national security staff, between the international side and the domestic side, between the health people and the disaster people,” Konyndyk said. “And so the different elements of that Ebola response didn’t roll up together into a coherent whole until Ron Klain was appointed as the Ebola czar.”
“I accept the proposition that it is hard to know whether things would have been different if the right structure had been place,” Klain said. “But without the right structure, there was zero chance it was going to work.”
One key issue during such reorganizations is whether policy expertise is maintained. Anthony Ruggiero, the current senior director for weapons of mass destruction and biodefense, has a background mostly in North Korea policy, for instance.
Luciana Borio, the previous director for medical and biodefense preparedness, is a practicing medical doctor and has an extensive background in medical health preparedness.
Borio left the NSC in March 2019 and in recent months has co-written a series of farsighted articles on how to prepare for the pandemic. “ Act now to prevent an American epidemic,” which appeared in the Wall Street Journal on Jan. 28, warned there would be a shortage of tests unless the private sector was involved. The White House would not confirm the name of Borio’s replacement.
Without the right expertise, an official may not know the right questions — the hard questions — to ask of their counterparts in other agencies, who are often subject matter experts themselves.
“The NSC doesn’t make policy but it does (and must) make sure that the Department-level policymakers are focused on the right questions and understanding the landscape beyond just their own agencies’ perspectives,” Konyndyk said. “In this case the questions were pretty obvious and straightforward to anyone with outbreak experience: could a Wuhan-like outbreak happen here (Yes), are we ready for that (No), what are agencies doing to prepare the country for that contingency while working to avert it (not much, as it has turned out).”
The Biden campaign defended his tweet. A campaign official noted the first recommendation of a bipartisan report that was issued in November:
“The U.S. government should re-establish a directorate for global health security and biodefense on the National Security Council (NSC) staff and should name a senior-level leader in charge of coordinating U.S. efforts to anticipate, prevent, and respond to biological crises. These actions will ensure that the necessary leadership, authority, and accountability is in place to protect the United States from a deadly and costly health security emergency….It remains unclear who would be in charge at the White House in the case of a grave pandemic threat or cross-border biological crisis, whether natural, accidental, or deliberate.”
Indeed, Trump initially on Jan. 29 named Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar as chair of a coronavirus task force, with a coordinating role played by the NSC. A month later, Vice President Pence took charge.
One former administration official dismissed the debate over the NSC office as a relic of another type of presidency. “There isn’t any organizational chart in the U.S. government that makes any difference in the Trump administration,” the official said. “ Trump is more likely to say to Jared [Kushner], ‘What do you think we should do?’ That’s the big problem.”
more at washingtonpost.com
I think this article elaborates your (Lane's) point. |
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