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Stephen Gottlieb: Trump's Negligence In The Coronavirus Epidemic

Presidents are obligated to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.” They are supposed to manage, administer and appoint people to carry out the tasks of government. Trump interprets that as his right to fire experts and replace them with yes-men devoted only to him. He’s reinstated the long disgraced spoils system in an era when everything is much more difficult and complex.

General and then President Ulysses Grant advocated and signed a merit system for federal employees when he was president in 1871. The federal Civil Service system was finally passed and reestablished under President Chester Arthur in 1883. It was designed to make sure that we have people competent to the tasks in front of them.

Trump is not a doctor or a scientific researcher. The medicine and science of protecting us from disease are the jobs of experts at the Center for Disease Control. As we would not ask our neighbor to diagnose and cure appendicitis or cancer, so we should have and listen to the experts at the CDC. But Trump muzzled and contradicted its experts, drastically cut CDC funding by three-quarters of a billion dollars, cut programs designed to prevent epidemics, and eliminated an office designed to deal with global pandemics, only to discover that we are in the middle of an emergency and try to restore some of the money when it’s already too late.

Unfortunately his handling of the coronavirus epidemic is evidence of Trump’s incompetence. It is also a disaster. Lots of people will die. Some people may think they are wealthy and immune and may survive. But as John Donne told us:

No man is an island entire of itself … any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind. And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

Minimum wage workers with minimal or no health insurance won’t get adequate medical care in time to protect the community. But their illness diminishes all of us. They are our food service workers; staff our groceries and drug stores; care for our parents in nursing homes and take care of our children in schools and day care; and do many of the other chores we daily depend on. In an epidemic everyone matters but who will take care of them? It horrified many of us that Trump ignored the hurricane damage to Puerto Rico. But there aren’t 1,000 miles of water between people infected with corona virus and the rest of us.

Neither Trump nor anyone else should be allowed to cut the budgets and eliminate the people who protect our health, try to blame them and their departments for failing to protect us, and then try to show how devoted they are to us by rushing to add dollars back after trouble has already broken out. It’s too late, too foolish, too demoralizing and too sickening. The time, damage and lives lost to incompetence cannot be restored.

Steve Gottlieb’s latest book is Unfit for Democracy: The Roberts Court and The Breakdown of American Politics. He is the Jay and Ruth Caplan Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Albany Law School, served on the New York Civil Liberties Union board, on the New York Advisory Committee to the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, and as a US Peace Corps Volunteer in Iran.

The views expressed by commentators are solely those of the authors. They do not necessarily reflect the views of this station or its management.

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