Both the politicians and the experts flubbed COVID-19 response

The U.S. response to the COVID-19 pandemic over the past 18 months has been poor. Despite one major victory — the quick approval and production of vaccines — nothing can obscure the fact that more than 600,000 people have died and many more have become seriously ill. Despite rampant polarization, most of us can agree on that. What we can’t agree on, is who to blame.

After the Bay of Pigs, President Kennedy said, “Success has many fathers, but failure is an orphan.” The failure to better combat COVID-19 may prove President Kennedy wrong. Democrats and opponents of former President Trump blame him for much of our suffering. Trump supporters tend to lay the blame at the feet of the federal bureaucracy, particularly the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). There is a fair amount of evidence to support both camps.

The case against Trump is well known. He minimized the pandemic throughout 2020, clearly more concerned with his re-election than with public health (and not realizing how they were related). He promoted quack cures such as hydroxychloroquine, and he downplayed and even mocked the idea of wearing masks. All of these actions are inexcusable — and no doubt cost lives.

The challenge in examining the government response to the pandemic is that these actions were so outrageous, they obscure failures by other actors. In particular, the CDC has not acquitted itself well. The poorly explained interpretations of the Provincetown study is just the latest example. Part of the reason CDC has struggled is that the agency was under the Trump administration for the first year of the pandemic and had to carefully manage its relationship with the president. But this is far from the entire story.

Many of CDC’s failures stem from causes familiar to students of bureaucratic agencies. Agencies (like other organizations) have personalities. They have strengths and weaknesses. Most agencies are very zealous early in their lives and become more rule-bound and risk averse as they age. Many agencies also have a small number of events in their history that play a disproportionate role in their evolution.

A new book documents how, before the pandemic, the most recent major event in CDC’s history was the 1976 Swine Flu outbreak. CDC pushed a mass vaccination campaign, but the epidemic never materialized — while the vaccine had negative side effects including some deaths. The event created a gun-shy mentality in the agency that would cost it 44 years later.

CDC also exhibited several other faults common to large organizations, particularly government agencies. Their tunnel vision in thinking about the pandemic led them to ignore the indirect consequences of shutting down workplaces and particularly schools. CDC also exhibited the pathology of paternalism best exemplified early in the pandemic when they recommended against mask use but failed to explain that this recommendation was issued to save masks for health care workers. This has had negative consequences for mask adoption once masks became more widely available.

The failures both by the Trump administration generally and by CDC specifically highlight the importance of the role of both competent political leadership and expert agencies in modern government.

Political leadership provides needed democratic accountability. Experts are inevitably going to get some things wrong and give insufficient consideration to concerns outside their domain. An expert agency untethered to effective elected leadership is destined to damage public faith in government.

But effective political leaders also need expert agencies. Presidents and their advisers are responsible for a wide array of subject areas that extend beyond their areas of expertise. Without a federal bureaucracy staffed and led by substantive experts, government responses to crises are also doomed to failure.

Checks and balances is typically thought of as referring to the relationship between the president and the other two branches of government — but the COVID-19 pandemic failures also shows the need both for an expert bureaucracy, and for the need for that bureaucracy to be checked and balanced by competent elected officials.

Stuart Shapiro is professor and director of the Public Policy Program at the Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy at Rutgers University, and a member of the Scholars Strategy Network. Follow him on Twitter @shapiro_stuart.