Donald Trump and his chief strategist Steve Bannon in the White House, January 22, 2017 (Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty)

Written with Alex Waddan of the University of Leicester for America Unfiltered, a joint project of the Clinton Institute and EA WorldView:

In the early days of the Trump Administration, reports abounded of the desire by those now in charge to undo the “deep state”.

Presidential advisor Steve Bannon in particular was an outspoken fan not only of deregulation, but of dismantling parts of the US Government. Every day, he claimed, “would be a battle for deconstruction of the administrative state“.

This was not simply a determination to reduce the size and scope of the federal government and its seemingly extravagant public spending, which amounted to a hefty $3.85 trillion in fiscal year 2016. It also reflected a suspicion of the value of a core function of a career state bureaucracy in a liberal democracy: to provide advice and informed guidance to the changing political guard.

Hollowing Out

As George Packer has illustrated, the President’s personal frustration with career professionals manifested itself in very public tirades against the activities of the FBI, the Justice Department, and the State Department. At one press briefing, Trump referred to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo as heading the “Deep State Department“.

Away from the public eye, federal agencies found themselves being reorganized in ways that many employees found unacceptable. In May 2019, the Washington Post reported that many personnel had left the Economic Research Service and the National Institute for Food and Agriculture over plans to relocate the agencies, despite warnings that such a move would diminish their operational capacity. The Post also reported that in the opening 18 months of Trump’s presidency, the Environmental Protection Agency had a net loss of about 1200 staff, or 8% of its workforce.

This hollowing out of the EPA and the US Department of Agriculture reflected a distaste for the imposition of extra costs on business through oversight functions. The disdain for these agencies was seen in early appointments to key positions at Agriculture, with knowledge of the farming industry not required. The nomination of former Texas Governor, Rick Perry, to be Secretary of Energy suggested that this department was likely to take a light touch to its regulatory role, given how Perry had previously called for the department’s abolition.

As Michael Lewis notes, ignoring experts on subjects such as climate or nutrition has downstream effects, likely to manifest themselves when someone else holds political power and complicating the question of blame for negative consequences.

Falsely Blaming Previous Administrations

That neglect of distant risk proved calamitous when Covid-19 appeared.

Unsurprisingly, Donald Trump claims to have acted perfectly and has blamed the lack of preparedness to deal with the virus on previous administrations. The evidence does not support this interpretation of events.

It would be silly to expect any government to have an extensive off-the-shelf tool kit to deal with the particularities of the novel Coronavirus, but both the Bush and Obama Administrations had taken the threat of pandemic seriously and had carried out some planning for a catastrophe. However imperfect these plans were, they existed but the Trump Administration downsized these efforts rather than built on them.

In 2005, after reading a book on the 1918 Spanish influenza, President George W. Bush called for a $7 billion national pandemic strategy. This was met with inevitable doubt when the nation faced so many other challenges, but in this instance, the President was listening to the experts: “If we wait for a pandemic to appear, it will be too late.”

Other warning shots were being fired from a range of outlets for years before Covid-19 struck. In 2012, the Rand Corporation’s survey of international threats reported that pandemics were “capable of destroying America’s way of life”. Two years later, the Obama Administration faced its own health security crisis, the lethal Ebola virus.

As the threat loomed in late 2014, Barack Obama appointed Ron Klain as Ebola Czar to oversee the management of the international challenge. At the time, alongside his social media disapproval of the Center for Disease Control (CDC), Donald Trump challenged the Klein appointment, “Do we need more people? Do we need more bureaucracy?”

Trump’s Response

As President, Donald Trump’s disparaging approach to “bureaucracy” is undiminished. Stories of his disinterest in a 2016 transition team have been widely shared, along with tales of his desire for unyielding loyalty from staff and a disdain for science and experts. As documented by public finance expert Linda Bilmes, CDC was a target for cuts in the administration’s proposed budgets.

This might explain why the CDC appeared slow in its response to the Coronavirus outbreak on American soil. The Center was not in a position to move swiftly from normal peacetime operations to something resembling wartime requirements. An employee with 27 years of experience voiced his incredulity that offers by CDC laboratorians to use their facilities for Covid–19 testing were rejected by the Centers’ administrators.

The specific threat was flagged up by the Chinese on December 31, 2019 to the World Health Organization’s China Country Office. Four weeks later, a memorandum from trade advisor Peter Navarro to Trump and the National Security Council warned, “The lack of immune protection or an existing cure or vaccine would leave Americans defenseless in the face of a full blown Coronavirus outbreak on US soil.”

But Trump’s public utterances remained upbeat.

By the time the Administration awoke to the reality of what a pro-active pandemic response required, the nation led the world in number of cases.

See also TrumpWatch, Day 1,178: How Trump Fiddled While Coronavirus Spread

In late March 2020, Politco reported that the Obama administration left a pandemic “playbook” for its successors to provide continuity and share experience.

Trump’s circle did not display a desire to engage with planning. The PREDICT Project was a “smoke alarm” for pandemics, partnering with 60 foreign laboratories to detect viruses with potential global threats. But, budgeted for $200 million over five years, PREDICT ran out of funding in September 2019.

The price tag was a prescient instance of ‘administrative state” expenditure that is beyond the daily running of the country. And it was an example of the type of program with which Steve Bannon wanted to do “battle” and defeat.

With the US and much of the globe in a state of lockdown with an as-yet unknown human and economic cost, the $40 million per year smoke alarm would have been public money well spent.

But not for a President and an inner circle more concerned with their myth of the “deep state”.