Over the last month, the scripts of the daily White House COVID-19 briefings have followed a familiar pattern: President Trump leads off with assurances that the crisis remains “totally under control” and that miracle cures are just around the corner. Then agency experts come to the microphone and tell a very different story.
For example, on March 19, the president reported that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) “very, very quickly” approved a malaria drug, hydroxychloroquine, for treating COVID-19 that it had previously approved for lupus, malaria, and rheumatoid arthritis. Later in the briefing, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the long-time head of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases, cautioned listeners that controlled testing would have to be completed before we know whether the drug works on the novel coronavirus. And FDA later warned that it had definitely not approved hydroxychloroquine for fighting the virus.
The warnings may have been too late. Within days, there was a run on the drugs, and one person in Nigeria had died and two more were hospitalized after taking large doses of chloroquine to treat what they thought were COVID-19 infections. Meanwhile, patients who need the drug for approved uses are in danger of being unable to get it.
Fast forward three weeks. FDA still has not approved any drugs, including the malaria drug for fighting the virus. Yet, despite the agency’s scientific concerns, the president openly touts the drug as a potential cure.
A pandemic is not politically convenient for any president in an election year. No doubt it can be tempting to a president to sugarcoat the truth in an effort to calm financial markets and give the overall impression that all is well under his steady leadership.
But President Trump and his appointees also oversee the vast expert bureaucracy. Their power extends not only to the decisions about whether experts like Fauci are invited to briefings or allowed to approach the microphone but also to what the experts do and the types of problems they work on. And, we know from history that if the experts produce politically inconvenient findings, those findings can be altered before they reach the public.
Over the last four decades, we have seen many instances of this political suppression of unwelcome expert analysis. It can be accomplished by reassigning experts who give inconvenient advice, manipulating algorithms and data used in expert analysis, “stacking” expert panels, and defunding expert offices.
Since internal discussions between politicians and experts are often classified as “deliberative,” it is usually impossible for the public to know whether politics distorted an agency’s scientific analysis and judgment.
We can see tell-tale signs of these internal clashes between science and politics in the president’s daily briefings. Fauci’s corrections of the president’s statements have undermined Trump’s desired message as well as his credibility. And Fauci understands that he “can’t jump in front of the microphone and push [the president] down.”
Behind the scenes, it is looking like Fauci and the government experts are losing battles to nonexperts like Peter Navarro, an administration economist, and Fox News pundit Laura Ingraham, who met with Trump to discuss hydroxychloroquine last Friday. At the Saturday coronavirus briefing, President Trump sounded like a patent medicine salesman for hydroxychloroquine as he urged listeners to “take it,” because “[i]t can clean out the lungs.”
When Fauci approached the lectern to answer a question about the effectiveness of hydroxychloroquine, Trump cut him off, presumably wary of being contradicted.
As long as inconvenient expert information can be sidelined by the president, we are at risk of losing a lot more than just Fauci’s measured advice at public briefings. Since the political apparatus that runs expert bureaucracies has tentacles that run deeply into their daily work, we may lose a critical source of expertise at a time when we need it most. Agency scientists, for example, may be instructed by their political managers to focus on only the most optimistic scenarios, with few resources allocated to model worst-case projections.
So what can we do to ensure that expertise isn’t trumped by politics in this most perilous of times?
Restructuring bureaucracy to ensure greater autonomy is obviously not a realistic option while in the throes of a public emergency, but there may be an intermediate solution. We should create an emergency blue-ribbon panel of scientists tasked with assessing the emerging evidence and offering continuous advice on pandemic response free of political control. Such a team would need complete autonomy and independence to speak, advise, and educate, without any reassignments or clearance requirements. Unlike some legislative proposals, the purpose of this panel would be to provide immediate, real-time information and guidance to the nation as the epidemic continues to unfold. Congress or the president could ask the National Academies of Sciences to assemble the team, rather than drawing nominees from the political branches.
Most of these experts should be career scientists, like Fauci, from federal agencies, serious professionals who understand the scientific issues and are familiar with the government’s response capabilities. Some could come from academia. But their jobs would be protected, and their collective views would be shielded from political pressure and control for the duration of the crisis.
Such “firewalled” expert advice is not entirely foreign to our bureaucracy, but it is not used nearly often enough.
Presidents and their appointees will always have a microphone in times of crisis, and government experts will never be able to jump in front of them. It is time to give those experts their own microphone.
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Thomas McGarity, Wendy Wagner | April 13, 2020
Over the last month, the scripts of the daily White House COVID-19 briefings have followed a familiar pattern: President Trump leads off with assurances that the crisis remains “totally under control” and that miracle cures are just around the corner. Then agency experts come to the microphone and tell a very different story. For example, on March 19, the president reported that the Food and Drug Administration “very, very quickly” approved a malaria drug, hydroxychloroquine, for treating COVID-19 that it had previously approved for lupus, malaria, and rheumatoid arthritis. Later in the briefing, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the long-time head of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases, cautioned listeners that controlled testing would have to be completed before we know whether the drug works on the novel coronavirus. And FDA later warned that it had definitely not approved hydroxychloroquine for fighting the virus.
Rena Steinzor | April 10, 2020
If you were the head of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) as news of the coronavirus pandemic hit, what would you do to implement your mission to protect public health? The best answer has three parts: first, determine what specific categories of pollution could exacerbate the disease; second, assemble staff experts to develop lists of companies that produce that pollution; and, third, figure out how the federal government could ensure that companies do their best to mitigate emissions.
James Goodwin | April 9, 2020
Who does the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) work for? The answer would seem to be us, the American public, given that the statutes it is charged with implementing are focused first and foremost on protecting our health and the natural environment we all depend upon. The Trump administration, however, has transformed this critical protector agency into a powerful of tool of corporate polluters, one dedicated to fattening these industries’ already healthy bottom lines at the expense of the broader public interest. The evidence of this brazen degree of corporate capture at the Trump EPA abounds.
Katie Tracy | April 9, 2020
On April 9, the Center for Progressive Reform joined the National Council for Occupational Safety and Health in calling on the U.S. Centers for Diseases Control and Prevention (CDC) to retract its outrageous guidance that allows employers to send workers potentially exposed to coronavirus back to work without any guaranteed protections. This flawed guidance is weaker than previous guidance, fails to protect workers, and is not based on scientific evidence.
Joel A. Mintz | April 8, 2020
It has often been observed that natural disasters bring out the best and worst in people. Sadly, with regard to environmental protection, the coronavirus pandemic has brought out the worst in the Trump administration. Using the pandemic as a pretext, Trump's EPA has continued to propose and implement substantial rollbacks in important safeguards to our health and the environment while issuing an unduly lax enforcement policy. In a memorandum issued March 26, EPA's Assistant Administrator for Enforcement and Compliance announced a "temporary" policy governing EPA enforcement during the pandemic. It declares the agency will now not seek civil penalties when pollution sources violate "routine compliance monitoring, integrity testing, sampling, laboratory analysis, training and reporting or certification obligations" as a result of COVID-19.
David Driesen | April 8, 2020
Last week, Hungarian President Viktor Orbán used the coronavirus as an excuse to secure emergency legislation giving him permanent dictatorial powers. President Trump has long admired Orbán and emulated the democracy-undermining strategies that brought Hungary to this point — demonizing opponents; seeking bogus corruption investigations against opposition politicians; using vicious rhetoric, economic pressures, and licensing threats to undermine independent media; and whipping up hatred of immigrants. Trump's autocratic approach to expertise has facilitated the spread of the coronavirus, as he dismantled the apparatus in place to prepare for and deal with a pandemic and caused leading experts to resign, and he has repeatedly used White House coronavirus briefings to blunt needed public health warnings by substituting his imagined "common sense" for the advice of actual experts.
David Flores | April 7, 2020
With all the talk of the "new normal" brought about by the coronavirus pandemic, we cannot lose sight of how government policies and heavy industry continue to force certain populations and communities into a persistent existential nightmare. Polluted air, poisoned water, the threat of chemical explosions – these are all unjust realities that many marginalized and vulnerable Americans face all the time that are even more concerning in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. Nothing could make these injustices more outrageously apparent and dangerous than EPA’s signaled retreat on environmental standards and enforcement, which cravenly takes advantage of the global pandemic and a rapidly expanding economic collapse.
Katie Tracy | April 3, 2020
Amazon's response to the coronavirus pandemic is the latest in a long line of instances where the company has put profit ahead of the health, safety, and economic well-being of its workforce. According to Amazon employees at its fulfillment centers and Whole Foods stores, the company is refusing to provide even basic health and safety protections for workers in jobs where they could be exposed to coronavirus.
Joseph Tomain | April 3, 2020
The coronavirus has already taught us about the role of citizens and their government. First, we have learned that we have vibrant and reliable state and local governments, many of which actively responded to the pandemic even as the White House misinformed the public and largely sat on its hands for months. Second, science and expertise should not be politicized. Instead, they are necessary factors upon which we rely for information and, when necessary, for guidance about which actions to take and about how we should live our lives in threatening circumstances.