Trump's mistrust of experts has diluted response
By Noah Feldman / Bloomberg Opinion
With every passing day, it becomes more and more apparent that the U.S. federal government’s response to Covid-19 has been appallingly slow and inadequate. A major reason is that the person at the apex of that institution, President Trump, dislikes and distrusts the expert bureaucrats who make the government actually function.
The laws that govern emergencies like the coronavirus pandemic give enormous power to the executive branch to direct and coordinate disaster response. These laws are not designed to empower the president personally. To the contrary, the whole point of the emergency laws is to empower government experts who know what must be done in a crisis; that is, career technocrats who work at agencies like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Congress doesn’t trust the president in an emergency. It trusts the experts.
But Trump has spent his three-plus years in office attacking exactly these kinds of non-partisan career experts as a “swamp” that needs to be drained.
In an ordinary administration, the president would have responded to mounting pandemic concerns by designating a career technocrat — say, someone like the preeminent public health expert in the government, Dr. Anthony Fauci — to take charge of national response. Instead, Trump at first gave us no one; then Vice President Mike Pence, who foundered; and now, his son-in-law and preferred last-ditch trouble-shooter, Jared Kushner, who must try to impose some logical order on a situation that has already fallen into substantial disarray.
https://www.heraldnet.com/opinion/commentary-trumps-mistrust-of-experts-has-diluted-response/
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