| The Trump administration’s coronavirus task force will begin winding down its work, likely shifting responsibility for the response to the virus back to the Federal Emergency Management Agency around the end of the month.
For those who aren’t fans of the president, it’s easy to dismiss the pending breakup of the task force as good riddance to a group whose main public-facing function seemed to be giving nightly airtime for Trump to opine on the usefulness of chemical disinfectant as a medical treatment, or to spar with the press in the (socially distanced) briefing room.
But the U.S. federal government has put a man on the moon, fought two world wars and helped make capitalism the world’s dominant economic ideology. Whatever you think of the man who leads it, the White House de-prioritizing the federal response is almost certain to draw the attention of that mighty engine and the resources it commands elsewhere at a time when states still need leadership and aid.
But the White House has decided that it’s time to move on.
“Will some people be affected? Yes. Will some people be affected badly? Yes,” Trump said Tuesday. “But we have to get our country open and we have to get it open soon.”
President Donald Trump tours a Honeywell factory producing N95 masks.
Photographer: BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP
If the task force’s job is over, the outbreak isn’t. Cases continue to grow by at least 20,000 a day. If 100,000 Americans die of the disease this year, as Trump has predicted, it will be the nation’s seventh-leading cause of death, ahead of diabetes and behind Alzheimer’s (presuming trends from the last few years hold).
The states are about to enter uncharted territory. When many of them went into lockdown, cases were still relatively small in number. Now they’ve been seeded widely and continue to expand at the same rapid pace they have for weeks. Whatever the task force was—an “all of government” response or a nightly television show—it’s receding into the background at a time when the ending is far from certain.—Drew Armstrong |