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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Heywood40 who wrote (1220444)	4/14/2020 4:50:26 PM
From: Honey_Bee	2 Recommendations Recommended By Bill FJB Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 1578485

I have no idea who you are calling such a vulgar name. It wouldn't be the American Patriots that read and post on my Thread, would it? Many of whom actually post on this thread also....

To: Heywood40 who wrote (1220444)	4/14/2020 6:11:58 PM
From: puborectalis	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1578485

The White House has tried to reassure the public that it’s on top of the coronavirus pandemic, declaring it an “ all-hands-on-deck effort.” Yet as the disease has ripped through the country, many of President Donald Trump’s Cabinet members have been largely absent or have failed to use the powers of their agencies to respond to a crisis that has shut down the economy and killed more than 20,000 Americans. “The absence of Trump’s Cabinet has been a staggering, if not unsurprising, abdication of leadership,” said Kyle Herrig, president of Accountable.US, a nonpartisan government watchdog group. “With millions of Americans losing their jobs and health care, the entire education system shifting to remote learning, and working people across the country struggling to pay rent, you’d think the Cabinet would show some urgency in upholding their oaths and helping the country navigate this crisis.” A few Cabinet secretaries ? Steve Mnuchin at Treasury and Alex Azar at Health and Human Services, for example ? are on the White House’s coronavirus task force and in the thick of the response. But for an “all-hands-on-deck” approach, the muted response from a number of other secretaries is noticeable. While they may execute response initiatives here and there, the overall approach has been to let the crisis sort itself out and assume that everything will eventually go back to normal. The disjointed approach from the Cabinet is consistent, however, with the White House’s lack of any clear plan for ending the crisis. Chris Lu was President Barack Obama’s Cabinet secretary, his point person to the federal agencies who coordinated the work of the Cabinet. He later served as deputy secretary in the Labor Department. Lu said that every few months, the senior White House staff and Cabinet secretaries would get together in a big room and go through exercises about what to do in situations like an earthquake or failure of the power grid ? in addition to dealing with real crises like the H1N1 flu pandemic. “The White House functionally can’t do anything,” he said. “The White House can only act through agencies, because agencies have money, programs, enforcement powers. This was drilled into us. It was understood that look, even if your agency isn’t on the front line of responding to a crisis, it would be involved in the relief effort in some way.” Lu said there were two key components that made the Obama team work and that the Trump administration is missing: continuity among the political appointees and a willingness to trust career civil servants. Trump has had higher turnover among Cabinet secretaries and senior staff than any other recent president, making it more difficult for that group of top officials to develop strong working relationships and understand how the machinery of government works. The president has also decimated the ranks of career civil servants, questioning federal bureaucrats’ loyalty, denigrating their work and just generally trying to make their lives so miserable that they quit. Ideally, these people should be some of the greatest resources for the White House. “Within every agency, I guarantee you there’s institutional knowledge ? or there should be institutional knowledge ? of people who have gone through ... comparable crises who can tell you here’s exactly all the levers that you can push and pull to help improve things,” Lu said. In late February, when Trump was still downplaying the threat of the coronavirus, a sizable chunk of the Cabinet did appear in public ? but it was to speak at the Conservative Political Action Conference, a partisan gathering of right-wing activists that ended up having a coronavirus scare.