takethepoints
Helluva Engineer
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Just so everybody will remember:It's evidence that we should have been better prepared. Pandemics like these are "part of a legally required transition exercise with members of the outgoing administration". This same exercise will be required of Trump's team to the next incoming administration...whether in 2020 or 2024.
What's interesting is there's an exercise, documents provided in the links, that bring up the exact questions we are grappling with now...so those questions had a 2 year gestation period for an incident like this.
We can't predict WHEN something will come, but we can predict that something WILL come.
There was a transition team headed by Chris Christie that interviewed Obama administration officials, prepared a seven volume report on each agency and where they were as of the takeover, and suggested new officials to take over in political appointments. The day after Trump was inaugurated Christie was at Trump Tower to deliver the results of three months work and report to Trump about his team's recommendations. He was taken aside by Steve Bannon before he got in the elevator, told that he and his whole team had been fired, and to leave the report in the lobby. The report itself was soon destroyed. Also, the Obama administration, just like the Bush administration, had put together a course on what the government did and how it did it, then sat there through the entire transition period without being asked about what was going on. The "transition teams" sent out from the White House spent virtually no time at all learning about the various agencies of our government. They were mainly interested in finding out who did things Trump didn't like.
So who ends up running things? Take Trump's first nominee for the chief science job at Agriculture. That would be Sam Clovis, a right wing radio host and Trump supporter with absolutely no science background at all. (Unless you consider a Doctor of Public Administration a qualification for agricultural research, that is.) Luckily, the statute that created the office didn't allow him to take it; the law requires, you know, actual expertise.
For those interested in the gory details on this, I recommend Mike Lewis's The Fifth Risk. That's the risk a society runs when it falls into the habit of responding to long term risks with short term solutions. Sort of like the way the administration has "worked" on COVID-19 for the last five months.