“On some great and glorious day…the White House will be occupied by a downright fool and complete narcissistic moron.”
 --H. L. Mencken, Baltimore Evening Sun, July 26, 1920
 
And here we are. It took almost a century for Mencken’s prediction in all its horror to come to pass. It is not totally shocking that a political party that has spent almost the last half-century attacking government and disdaining truth, science and expertise and that tried to position a Sarah Palin one heartbeat away from the presidency would nominate a con man with no sense of decency. What is astonishing is that so many millions of Americans fall for his lies and cruelty.
 
People who scorn the sober advice of healthcare professionals in favor of someone who advocates ingesting bleach, taking risky medications, and eschewing masks and social distancing are playing a very dangerous game, one that could kill a number of them, their loved ones and others. Turning wise counsel into a culture war and political statement is reprehensible. Defiance of good judgment in the pursuit of so-called freedom is just plain foolish.
 
What is even more head-scratching is that these fervent Trump cultists don’t understand that their idol doesn’t care a whit about what happens to them. This is all about him and his re-election. If thousands of his supporters die as a consequence, it won’t affect him in the least. By giving him a pass, they are risking their own lives while endorsing the train wreck he is making of America and the planet.
 
When not pulling all-nighters tweeting insanities, inanities and incendiaries, Donald Trump is busy dismantling our leadership role in the world, decimating democratic values and the rule of law, making Americans’ lives miserable and costing us tens of thousands of our fellow citizens. All in the pursuit of petulance and re-election, not necessarily in that order.
 
But this big, top-of-the-fold stuff is not all that Trump is doing to destroy lives and livelihoods. For example, he was about to do even more damage, sub rosa because it contradicted his usual fake, chickenhawk concern for “our great military” that he fought so vigorously to avoid joining back in the day. It was only due to tremendous push-back from both blue and red state governors that he backed off. His latest war on decency took the form of trying to end the deployment of our National Guard currently on the frontlines of the COVID-19 crisis--one day before they become eligible for federal retirement and education benefits. After 90 days of active duty, Guardsmen fighting the pandemic would have their service count toward the benefits they deserve. But Trump wanted to end their deployment at 89 days. This is yet another example of the heartless cruelty at the center of his warped, soulless governing philosophy.
 
A president’s NUMBER ONE job is to keep Americans safe. Screwing the National Guard is just a small indicator of his disinterest in and inability to do that. Trump’s mammoth failure goes light years beyond that of any prior president. His botching of the job is historic and catastrophic and is a firable offense. November cannot come fast enough.
 
Dick Hermann
May 29, 2020

​Guess what! Suddenly, congressional Republicans are concerned about deficits and debt. This was one of the bedrock principles of what used to be the Republican Party before it mutated into the Trump Cult. Naively, I thought that after appropriating $3 trillion for Covid-19 relief, even the old codgers who cling to power under the guise of the GOP had finally, after 100 years, seen the Keynesian light, i.e., that the way to combat an economic downturn is to increase government spending.
 
But no, it is not to be. Mitch McConnell and even Donald Trump, whose ignorance of basic economics is exceeded only by his staggering historical illiteracy, are, voilà, suddenly worried about running up the national debt. This is, of course, after these characters pushed through a $2 trillion tax cut for the wealthy and big corporations in the days when coronavirus was still percolating only in bats. And that was on top of an equally large tax cut that Bush 43 gift-wrapped for the usual Republican suspects back in the aughts.
 
It’s instructive to look at what World War II cost America and compare it to today: The war cost $4.1 trillion in 2020 dollars. If you subtract the sale of war bonds, which covered 63 percent of the cost, you are left with $1.517 trillion in war debt (in 2020 dollars) at the end of the conflict, which amounted to 329 percent of GDP (without even considering the federal government’s non-war debt). Compare that to today, when even adding in $3 trillion (so far) of Covid-19 expenditures, total public debt adds up to 128 percent of GDP. We have a very long way to go before we arrive at World War II debt-to-GDP ratios.
 
What Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman and Congress understood back then was that a nation facing an existential crisis must spend whatever it takes to survive. Trump and McConnell and their clueless colleagues clearly do not understand that and we are the ones who will suffer the consequences.
 
By saving the country, the West and democracy back then, the money invested in the war was money well spent. Moreover, after the war, the wise growth policies pursued by the Truman, Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations brought that ratio down to pre-war levels by 1962. The 30 years of robust economic growth that followed the war give the lie to Trump’s spurious claims of creating “the greatest economy in history.”
 
We need to spend whatever it takes to assure our physical and economic survival. Anything less is a dereliction of duty and risks a societal devastation from which we might never recover.
 
Dick Hermann
May 22, 2020

​Donald Trump has declared victory over the coronavirus and turned his total attention to the one thing that consumes every millisecond of his existence: doing whatever is necessary to advance the well-being of Donald Trump. In the present circumstance, that means reopening the economy in hopes of generating a “V-shaped recovery,” perhaps his best hope of winning re-election.
 
For Trump, who is utterly incapable of nuance, every decisional calculus is the same: Will it help me or hurt me? That is as abstract as his thinking gets.
 
Consequently, the White House wrecking ball that has wreaked so much havoc and done so much damage for the last three-and-a-half years is now hurtling down on the heads of every American, confronting us with a Hobson’s choice of risking our jobs vs. risking our health. He, Vice President Pence and key White House staffers get tested daily for Covid-19. A positive test is followed immediately by extensive contact tracing, isolation and quarantine. The other 327 million Americans don’t need any of that, proclaims the president. Let them eat ventilators.
 
There are ways to reopen the economy safely without sacrificing the health, safety and lives of the public. A number of states are attempting to do that by introducing the same extensive safety measures that the White House has instituted for its favored few. What is holding them back is that there are not enough testing kits thanks to the Trump administration’s monumental failure to provide them.
 
Trump’s inability to see grays or subtleties has other negative consequences. He refuses to wear a mask because his Fox News propagandists tell him it makes him look weak and gives the impression that his “victory” over the virus might be a Pyrrhic one (you think?). Instead of modeling safe behavior for the citizenry, he demonstrates recklessness. The effect of this is that his locked-in base concludes that masks aren’t necessary, thus risking themselves and everyone with whom they come in contact to possible exposure to Covid-19 and its life-threatening consequences.
 
Instead of leading by example, Trump gives us lies, distortions, insults, raging tweetstorms, self-adulation, and complaints about not being sufficiently praised by governors and the media. Worse, this is compounded by his intellectual laziness, incompetence, moral bankruptcy and failure to step up to the plate and make even a pretense of understanding what is going on and lead us out of this catastrophe. Thus, with only 4 percent of the world’s population, we account for almost one-third of the global total of Covid-19 illnesses and just under one-third of the planet’s deaths. By any measure, we are doing worse than any of the other 33 developed nations in combatting the virus. Welcome to the Third World. He won’t own up to it, but there is only one place and one individual to which the finger of blame points for this disastrous performance.
 
With Trump at the helm, it is certain to get worse.
 
Dick Hermann
May 15, 2020

​Any lingering doubts that Donald Trump, his Senate partner-in-crime Mitch McConnell and the Republican Party are, despite their protestations, no friends of working men and women can finally be laid to rest. Trump and his political enablers have been playing white blue collar workers for years now, a cynical game that is the successor to the “Southern Strategy,” the brainchild of Richard Nixon that was key to his, Ronald Reagan, the Bushes and Trump’s electoral victories. That tactic effectively exploited Southern white fear of and anger about the civil rights movement. Trump took that to another level by pretending to sympathize with the fears, anger and grievances of white blue collar workers left behind by a changing global economy. The fact that he cares not at all for them is evident in his willingness to trade their illnesses and deaths for a re-election strategy.
 
Trump’s executive order invoking the Defense Production Act to compel beef, pork and poultry processing plants to reopen is a direct assault on workers’ health and lives. No industry’s workers have suffered more from Covid-19 infections than these individuals. Nationwide, more than 5,000 have contracted Covid-19 and the death toll keeps mounting. In one Iowa meat packing plant, 58 percent of the tested labor force was positive, forcing the plant to close. Similar plants have closed all over the country because of the rapid spread of the virus in the close working conditions in these plants where social distancing is virtually impossible. What Trump has done is to force this underpaid workforce that processes our food to choose between their jobs and their lives.
 
The rationale for the executive order is “to ensure a continued supply of protein for Americans.“ This ignores that there are plenty of alternative protein sources, including eggs, cheese and other dairy, seeds such as Quinoa, soy and many other plant-based products.
 
The executive order references the joint guidance (i.e., suggestions, not mandates) for meat processors issued by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). The opening paragraph of the guidance document tells you all you need to know about how effective this is likely to be in protecting worker health: “…workers may be permitted to continue work following potential exposure to COVID-19, provided they remain asymptomatic and additional precautions are implemented to protect them and the community.” One such precaution being implemented is providing workers with only one facemask a week. These facemasks are supposed to be for one-time use only and then discarded.
 
Meat processing is a close-order occupation. It is by its nature a highly dangerous environment. That is not going to change.
 
Worse, the executive order directs the U.S. Department of Labor to issue regulations protecting plant owners from liability if workers who return to the job come down with Covid-19. In other words, if you get sick and perhaps die because you returned to work, you or your heirs have no recourse.
 
Senate Majority Leader McConnell wants to take corporate liability protection to the next level and confer it across-the board on all employers. Fortunately, the House of Representatives will not go along with the sycophantic Senate Republicans whose contempt for the very people they and Trump profess to champion appears to know no bounds. However, that does not mean that McConnell won’t use this existential threat to workers as a negotiating ploy during the next round of relief bills to be considered by Congress. House Democrats may be pressured to give in on liability in return for getting some relief for desperate states and municipalities strapped for money to pay essential public sector laborers like cops, fire fighters, teachers, transit employees and sanitation workers. Trump and McConnell’s war on workers includes them, too.
 
When faced with doing good vs. doing harm, so far Trump and McConnell always choose the latter. The war on America’s workers is just the latest example of this tragic truism.
 
Dick Hermann
May 8, 2020

“…among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
       -Declaration of Independence
 
There is a reason why “Life” leads the list of “unalienable rights” specified in the Declaration of Independence. No reopening of the economy can proceed safely without first paying attention to survival.
 
Since the Trump administration has fallen down on its core responsibility to keep Americans safe, it falls to governors, mayors and city managers to step into the federal breach and assume responsibility for getting us through this catastrophe with as little damage to health and the economy as possible. Testing, which has become the poster child for the Trump government’s epic fail, is still woefully inadequate after two-plus months of lackluster attempts and a bodyguard of blatant administration lies beginning with Trump’s March 9 CDC visit when he claimed that “anyone who needs a test can get a test.” That was not true then and it’s not true now. While other countries test vast swaths of their populations, the United States cannot.
 
We hear a great deal of mumbo jumbo every day at Trump’s surreal press conferences about testing, mainly lies about test availability and unwarranted self-praise for the feeble number of tests being conducted. The real story about testing is that it is yet another of the many areas where the Trump administration has repeatedly demonstrated that it cannot manage the Covid-19 crisis. Again, the absence of federal competence means that it is up to state and local leaders instead. But testing is only the first step in the process of re-opening the nation and rebuilding our decimated economy. Contact tracing is the crucial next step.
 
Contract tracing means the ability to identify people who may have been in contact with someone who tests positive so that they can get treatment, be monitored, quarantined and kept from spreading the infection to others. The Trump administration, incredibly, has no plan for contact tracing, yet another epic fail. As with everything else concerning the virus, the buck has been passed to the states.
 
South Korea understood this necessity from its first alert (the same day as the U.S.) that a pandemic was imminent. The country immediately took steps to implement widespread testing and contact tracing, and the results have been impressive. Similarly, Taiwan and Germany have demonstrated competence in combatting the virus. By their quick responses, all three countries put the U.S. to shame.
 
States, municipalities and tribes need to act now to put effective contact tracing programs in place and not rely on the inept Trump government to perform any function essential to this process. That means hiring and training an army of contact tracers and providing them with the resources and protocols they will need to do this incredibly important job effectively. While a competent federal government would task the U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM) with recruitment and training of contact tracers—these two basic functions are OPM’s bread-and-butter—this won’t happen because Trump and his sycophants live in the moment. Judgment and planning are beyond them. It will be up to lower levels of government to get this right.
 
Successful foreign models (e.g., South Korea, Germany) for recruiting, training and managing contact tracers should be consulted and applied here. The Trump administration’s unreasoning hostility to anything foreign should not deter governors and mayors from directly contacting the knowledgeable authorities in those countries and learning from them how to conduct an effective contact tracing program. At a minimum, it should include:

• The basics of contact tracing
• Interviewing skills
• Key questions to ask
• Likely questions to answer
• Quarantine monitoring and follow-up
• Health information privacy and confidentiality
• Cultural sensitivity
• Communicating with the hearing-impaired
• Reporting requirements
• Continuous coaching and mentoring for quality improvement
• Technology

 
There is no percentage in delaying contact tracing program implementation in hopes that the Trump administration will get its act together. It won’t. States, cities and tribes must act now or suffer the life-and-death consequences.
 
Dick Hermann
May 1, 2020

​While loss is not a prerequisite for the development of empathy, it is rare to find leaders who have suffered loss who are not empathetic. Empathy in itself is often indicative of a great leader.
 
Abraham Lincoln; Teddy Roosevelt; Franklin Roosevelt; Jack Kennedy. All four presidents suffered grievous loss in their lives that helped them develop this essential leadership trait.
 
Lincoln watched helplessly as two of his young sons died, one while he was president. TR lost his mother and wife on the same day in the same house. FDR lived most of his life paralyzed by polio. JFK lost two siblings and suffered from a host of severe health problems.
 
What they all took away from those tragic, life-altering experiences was a deep-seated empathy for their fellow human beings and a concern for humanity that transcended self-interest. Their public narratives resonated with their constituents in a deeply personal and connected way. Moreover, their suffering contributed to making them strong leaders, presidents whom the public looked to for guidance and comfort in times of national crisis.
 
Contrast their tremendous empathy with the current White House occupant, a man completely devoid of empathy (and many of the other qualities we associate with being human). Donald Trump has rarely suffered any pain other than financial loss due to his own incompetence and being outed for his scams and lies. His total lack of empathy—or even the ability to “fake” it—can probably be attributed to his narcissistic worldview.
 
Compare Trump to his opponent in the November election and you see the empathy gap—nay chasm—writ about as large as it is possible to be. Joe Biden’s life has been defined too often by brutal heart-rending loss—his first wife and 1-year old daughter to a car accident that also severely injured his two sons, and more recently a son to brain cancer—sorrow that matches anything experienced by Lincoln, the Roosevelts or JFK. When he talks about this painful history publicly, it is impossible not to feel his emotion, his pain, and his profound compassion for his fellow men and women. He sincerely relates to the people who tell him their personal stories of suffering. His story and the way he recounts it often leaves his audience in tears. His ability to connect to the real-world sufferings of ordinary people affirms both his and their humanity. He understands what people in pain need to hear from a real leader.
 
This is about as far removed from the way Donald Trump views the world as it is possible to be. Trump’s warped personality makes it impossible for him to relate on any level to the rest of humanity. His empathy deficit leads to the poor and more often than not disastrous choices he has made and likely will continue to make during the current health and economic crises.
 
Combine Biden’s basic humanity with his experience managing big projects—the federal stimulus bill and its implementation, especially of infrastructure projects, that helped bring the nation back from the brink of economic collapse and turned around the economy in 2009; fostering the Affordable Care Act through Congress in 2010; and overseeing the Obama administration’s manufacturing and retraining initiatives in the second term.
 
Empathy also impacts other leadership qualities. It is inconceivable to imagine Biden saying, as Trump did: “I take no responsibility.” It is unthinkable to picture Biden tweeting incitements to violence to his supporters. An empathetic leader does not suggest that people consider ingesting toxic substances. A person battered by tragedy and who has had occasion to grieve so deeply doesn’t behave like that. He understands suffering and moves forward, having learned from bitter experience what coping requires. He picks himself up, climbs out of the depths of despair, and develops a world view that aligns with the people he wants to lead toward a better future.
 
Biden’s challenging life experience makes him understand what people are going through. He realizes at an elemental level what they need. Trump is completely incapable of comprehending this. Biden’s empathy has also has made him an altruist, a word that is not part of the Trump vocabulary.
 
The time has come to get empathy back, an essential quality for any leader.
 
Dick Hermann
April 24, 2020

​“Government is not the solution to our problem.
Government is the problem.”
“The nine most terrifying words in the English language:
‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help.’”
--Ronald Reagan
 
What we are learning every day that we are under siege by the coronavirus is just the opposite: The only place we can turn for relief from this massive scourge is government. There is no other entity that can possibly help to the extent needed during an existential crisis. Only government can combat the greatest health calamity to strike us in a hundred years. Only government is the answer to the most dire economic catastrophe since the Great Depression. No other establishment can marshal the trillions of dollars needed in order for businesses and individuals to survive.
 
Set aside for the moment that the current composition of our government is mired in the chaos and controversy that informs every day of the Trump administration. That does not detract from the fundamental fact that we have never needed government as much as we do now.
 
For 40 years Republicans have disparaged and decimated the federal government at every opportunity. Now that wrongheaded, self-destructive policy has come home to roost and Americans in droves are getting sick and dying as a consequence while the survivors watch their jobs and savings disappear. This is the harvest we glean from four decades of ruinous assaults on the institutions established to keep us safe.
 
The combination of knee-jerk anti-intellectualism, hostility to science, disdain for knowledge and expertise, penchant for fake news and denial of reality that are the other linchpins of the corruption of traditional conservatism that Republicans have hammered us with, has now put us in a terrible place. Whether we can emerge from this black hole is not guaranteed, given the Trump administration’s inability and even reluctance to get its ducks in order.
 
Despite having all of the levers of government in their hands, Donald Trump, the apotheosis of the Reagan Revolution, and his woeful administration and congressional allies cannot figure out how to pull them to make the machinery of government work at a time when the need to do so is desperate. This is what you get after decades of dismantling the very vehicle you are now attempting to drive.
 
In the absence of competent federal leadership, many state governors have moved into the breach and acquitted themselves well. It is worth noting that those who have not—at this writing five defiantly refuse to order their citizens to stay-at-home and self-isolate—are all Republicans. This is no accident. They spent their formative years and adult lives drinking the Reagan Kool-Aid.
 
It is remarkable that in a time when it is essential to set aside ideology in favor of practicality, Republicans cannot do what is demanded. Even though panic prompted the GOP’s congressional cohort to enact the most massive stimulus bill in history, they and the Trump administration cannot bring themselves to stop filtering relief through the now-discredited Reagan thesis. It is the current citizens of the United States who are paying for these 40 years of blind ignorance and unwarranted assaults on the very institutions established to safeguard our health and economic security.
 
These guardrails should never again be brought down in the service of ideological narrowmindedness. The Reagan Revolution must die with the demise of the coronavirus.
 
Dick Hermann
April 17, 2020

​Republicans have taken voter suppression to a new level. Wisconsin voters on April 7 had a Hobson’s choice: skip voting in the primary, or vote in person and risk dying.
 
Democrats and Republicans have been fighting over voting rights for years. Democrats keep trying to make it easier for people to vote — by expanding voting hours, allowing same-day registration, permitting early voting and vote-by-mail, reducing identification requirements and more — while Republicans have been making it harder to vote, mindful that a higher turnout might mean defeat for the GOP. Consequently, they raise the false specter of potential fraud every time a proposal to make the right to vote easier to exercise is proposed. Since voter fraud has been virtually non-existent, this Republican canard is on a par with all their others: trickle-down economics that benefit everyone; tax cuts that raise vast new revenues, etc.
 
The coronavirus crisis is taking this fight to another level.
 
What happened in Wisconsin makes clear that Republicans will stop at nothing to retain power. That state’s Republican legislature refused to postpone the primary to June, a decision upheld by Wisconsin’s Republican Supreme Court. Shortly thereafter, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to extend the deadline for mailing in absentee ballots, its 5-4 Republican majority seeing no reason why voters shouldn’t go to the polls and vote in person despite the state’s lockdown stay-at-home order and the risk to voter health.
 
President Trump jumped on the bandwagon, spouting the absentee voting fraud myth despite the fact that he has voted absentee by mail in every election since he defiled the White House. The only known fraud associated with absentee voting in recent years was “ballot harvesting” perpetrated by Republicans in North Carolina in 2018, a tainted election that was overturned by the courts. Other than that, instances of absentee voting fraud are infinitesimal. In fact, five states, including staunchly Republican Utah, conduct all of their elections using mail-in ballots. They report only a handful of cases of possible fraud out of millions of votes cast. Trump’s own commission charged with investigating election fraud disbanded when it could not find any wrongdoing.
 
So here we are, on the cusp of the most important presidential election in American history. Republicans believe they would lose a mail-in ballot election. President Trump has said that, if mail-in voting were allowed, no Republican would ever be elected again. In their desperation, they are solidly lined up against any attempt to put in place a system whereby Americans could vote without risking their lives. Senate Majority Leader McConnell refuses to consider any alternative to showing up at the polls notwithstanding the coronavirus danger. And the veil surrounding the aura of the Supreme Court has now been pierced. Its GOP majority shows itself willing to go to any lengths to make sure Republicans are advantaged come November. If you read between the lines of its disgraceful decision in the Wisconsin case, it implies: “We don’t care if voters die by virtue of exercising their right to vote. And if they don’t want to risk their lives, that’s good for Republicans.”
 
I don’t want to hear any more about Chief Justice John Roberts being a swing vote on the Court. He and his Republican court colleagues appear prepared to do whatever it takes to keep Trump in office, including jeopardizing voters’ lives.
 
Roberts has been on a mission to ensure Republican hegemony for years. In the infamous Citizens United case, he and his majority colleagues decimated the campaign finance laws in order to tilt the playing field toward Republicans (who always have more money). In 2013, in Shelby County v. Holder, Roberts stripped the Voting Rights Act of its preclearance mandate, thus allowing Jim Crow to return and deny African-Americans, who overwhelmingly vote Democrat, their voting rights. Last year, in Rucho v. Common Cause, he refused to involve the court in gerrymandering cases even when it was demonstrated that racism was a factor in how Republican legislatures drew district lines. All three cases, as with the Wisconsin case, were 5-4 decisions along ideological lines. So much for his dishonest claim that “We do not have Obama judges or Trump judges, Bush judges or Clinton judges. What we have is an extraordinary group of dedicated judges doing their level best to do equal right to those appearing before them. That independent judiciary is something we should all be thankful for.” Too bad he exempted his own Court from his statement.
 
It is a given that Trump and McConnell will do whatever they can to steal the November election. It is shocking that they have such a firm ally in John Roberts.
 
Dick Hermann
April 10, 2020

Maximize Use of the DPA
 
The Strategic National Stockpile having been allowed to deteriorate under the Trump administration, the President needs to turn to his full authority under the Defense Production Act of 1950 (DPA). The Act gives the President the power to redirect the entire economy to produce the goods and materials necessary to fight the coronavirus. Trump has invoked it thousands of times to make sure vital war materials are available. His reluctance to use it to the full extent to combat the coronavirus has aggravated his two months of denial, lies and lassitude that has made America the world leader in Covid-19 cases, strained the healthcare system to the breaking point, and caused massive suffering and deaths that could have been avoided.
 
He has refused to fully employ the Act because of lobbying by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the heads of Fortune 500 companies. His grudging, selective invocations of the Act affect only seven companies at this writing and do not go nearly far enough to mobilize U.S. manufacturers to produce the items essential to combatting the coronavirus. The problem with this narrow approach is that there is no way these firms can possibly satisfy even a miniscule portion of the desperate demand for ventilators, personal protective equipment and test kits coming in from our 6,200 hospitals and hundreds of labs. Thousands of manufacturing firms with these production capabilities are not being asked to join in. This is irresponsible and is guaranteed to prompt doctors and nurses to ration these life-saving devices as we proceed to the apex of the crisis. What Sarah Palin falsely claimed about Obamacare death panels will now become a reality under “Trumpcare.”
 
Fortunately, some manufacturers have voluntarily retrofitted their production facilities to make ventilators and other items, but their efforts are scattershot and unevenly distributed. Moreover, they operate in a coordination vacuum caused by federal confusion and ineptitude. That means that down the line when they eventually produce ventilators, for example, it is likely that the disorganized allocation and distribution channels will cause some hospitals to get an oversupply while desperate medical facilities will not get any.
 
Instead of using the DPA, Trump’s lame strategy was to have the Department of Health and Human Services issue a “Request for Information” on March 21st in an attempt to find out who makes ventilators. Two months into the pandemic, the government had no idea. You would think this might have been a high priority.
 
Appoint the One Right Coordinator: DLA
 
Compounding Trump’s failure to use the DPA is his appointment of anti-trade negotiator Peter Navarro as his DPA coordinator. There is nothing in Navarro’s background to indicate that he has the managerial experience and manufacturing knowledge to do this job competently. Moreover, Trump has sent son-in-law Jared Kushner to FEMA to coordinate its delivery of personal protective equipment to healthcare facilities, a job for which both he and FEMA are ill-equipped. Kushner because of zero experience and a history of failure, and FEMA because, while it is very competent to respond to emergencies like floods and hurricanes (Katrina aside) that are limited in geographic scope, it has little experience with nationwide catastrophes. So, along with Mike Pence, who heads the coronavirus task force, we now have three coordinators destined to spoil the stew. When one top-flight manager is demanded, we get three inexperienced coordinators and one agency that has never done anything like this before.
 
The solution is to call upon the one government agency with the expertise, track record, resources and manpower that can do the job: the Defense Logistics Agency (DLA). DLA’s 26,000 men and women have vast experience in directing and coordinating the production and delivery of massive supplies and equipment needed to successfully fight wars all over the world. They even have experience in past public health crises such as the 2014 Ebola outbreak. DLA could even help with the government’s woeful inability to get testing kits out to the places desperate for them. Not exploiting that competence in the present crisis is inexplicable and nothing short of scandalous.
 
It is possible that Donald Trump is unaware of this incredible resource he has at his disposal in DLA. Someone ought to tell him.
 
Full disclosure: I worked with DLA at the Pentagon on a variety of matters and always came away dazzled by its efficiency and expertise. I was also a FEMA legal consultant when the agency worked well.
 
Dick Hermann
April 3, 2020

COVID-19 exposes the glaring vulnerabilities of our under-siege healthcare system, forcing us to consider what we need to do to overhaul it once the current crisis has passed.
 
We can quickly identify at least four major reforms that need to be implemented:
 
1. Every American must have access to affordable healthcare at all times. No exceptions. As Bernie Sanders says (and I am no Bernie supporter): “Healthcare is a human right.” This means, at a minimum, that we need to provide an affordable public option to supplement the private insurance model that has served employed people and their families reasonably well for years. It is unconscionable that, during this health crisis, the Trump administration continues to pursue its court case seeking to terminate the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) and take away health coverage for 48 million Americans, removing their protection from pre-existing condition coverage denials and throwing their children off their insurance coverage long before the current age 26 mandate. The next Congress needs to enact “Medicare for all who want it” immediately upon convening.
 
2. The connection between employment and health insurance must be severed. The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability act of 1996 was supposed to accomplish this, but did not. Neither did Obamacare. The 158 million Americans who get their health coverage through their employer must be permitted to take their health coverage with them if they lose their jobs. They, and people who are not working, must be automatically enrolled in a public option plan while unemployed. No one should ever be without health coverage.
 
3. The Strategic National Stockpile (SNS) must always be fully funded and fully stocked. The Stockpile is the public health emergency equivalent of the National Defense Stockpile. Its purpose is simple and straightforward: rapid deployment (within 12 hours) to resupply overwhelmed local medical supplies during any public health threat. It has failed to achieve this, falling woefully short in the current pandemic. In 2009, the H1N1 influenza pandemic triggered the largest deployment in SNS history when 12.5 million antiviral regimens were deployed across the country as well as 19.6 million pieces of personal protective equipment (PPE) and 85.1 million N95 respirators. Since 2017, the Trump administration allowed the number of ventilators to plummet to only 16,600 (or 2½ per U.S. hospital)! The SNS must be stocked with more than enough PPE—masks, ventilators, scrubs, gloves, etc.—so that we are never caught short again when a pandemic strikes. And it is a certainty that, in an increasingly complex and intertwined world, there will be more pandemics.
 
Since assuming office, the Trump administration has undermined the SNS by: (1) moving responsibility for it—and what should be included in it—from the non-political Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to a political appointee in the Department of Health & Human Services. This was a license to politicize what products the government purchases for the SNS. Pharmaceutical firms began to lobby heavily for their products in lieu of the prior approach where only CDC medical experts made purchasing decisions; and (2) attempting, year-after-year, to slash the SNS budget despite its already being underfunded. So far, Congress has managed to stave off these cuts, but at the cost of being unable to increase funding for SNS supplies deemed essential to combatting a pandemic.
 
4. International cooperation to combat public health emergencies is a must. “America First” in this context means “America Worst.” The U.S. should take the lead in crafting an international treaty committing the nations of the world to work together to plan ahead, to combat future pandemics and to coordinate supply chains of essential materials so that they can be produced and shipped wherever needed. In the absence of such an agreement today, a German startup is currently trying to coordinate the production of PPE around the world by 3-D printing firms that have volunteered to aid in the battle against COVID-19. Viruses do not give a damn about borders. Neither should politicians.
 
Dick Hermann
March 27, 2020