[JDulin]

These problems are not due to an "administration". The rot of American institutions is deep. The competence and coherence of the entire American civil service and civil life has fallen precipitously in the last 20 years, and, in part because of their irrational fixation on this administration, people still cannot wrap theirs head around the fact that problem is in personnel and structure.

The CDC botched the development & rollout of a pretty simple PCR assay. The CDC happily participated in the 'don't test, don't tell' cover-up of the real # of stateside cases. The CDC and FDA were in territorial pissing matches with one another around test regulation. The FDA has hindered the effective deployment of tests and therapies at every turn. The entire journalistic chattering class was lecturing the American public no more than 2 weeks ago about how over-reacting to the virus or calling it the wrong name was more dangerous than the virus itself. The American economy spent the last 3 decades moving every single manufacturing facility and shred of know-how that could make PPE, ventilators, and pharmaceutical precursors overseas to save a few pennies, and wasn't stopped by the government. And we've now learned Congress was given an accurate assessment of the pandemic threat months ago and chose to... sell their private stocks.

This crisis is not going to result in happy little vision-less "to-do list" for future bureaucrats to improve upon, it is deepening the American people's awareness that the entire bureaucracy & elite class have been shown wanting and must be replaced in their entirety by massive reform of the federal civil service.

[Reedx]

People want a simple, tidy villain and hero story. As though everything would suddenly be solved if only their hero of choice vanquished the villain. Unfortunately, as you point out, the real problem is institutional decay.

A recent article summed this up pretty well:

"Such a mobilization failure is never an individual's fault. Rather, it reveals a hollow state. In the alphabet soup of federal agencies, there is no one with the information and authority to act on the consequences of an exponential curve...

In the middle of the 20th century, a cadre of credentialed experts was created to replace citizens. This was a mistake. The selection mechanism for entry into this cadre selects against bravery and original thinking. Experts should be consulted, but what use is an expert unwilling to consult on a grand vision? The American system of the 2020s through the city, county, state, and up to the federal level has been staffed with people who know how to speak and make themselves appear blameless, but not how to act."

https://americanmind.org/features/the-coronacrisis-and-our-f...

[omgwtfbyobbq]

There may be structural problems, but the current administration contributed significantly the poor response to this epidemic. Had they kept existing infrastructure and people in place, things could have gone significantly better.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-china-...

https://blog.ucsusa.org/anita-desikan/trump-administration-h...

[DocSavage]

There's a lot to be said about WH-level leaders with the authority to corral and force action down the chain. It's bad enough that the CDC and FDA screwed up, but there was no urgency from the top-down that solutions had to be rolled out in a timely matter or alternatives had to be explored even in parallel. You see the difference now, when there's a sense of urgency, and we are willing to break rules, engage lots of different groups to work on efforts in parallel, etc. None of that happens without urgency from the top.

[RickJWagner]

And the lateral side. Even right now, Congress is bickering about a relief bill, stuffing it with unrelated pork while people die.

There is plenty of blame (and some praise, too) to go around.

[vvanders]

Yeah, for me the inflection point was NOAA and hurricane Dorian. Only so many people can put their careers on the line before something breaks in an organization.

[xster]

Rather, the previous administration was just more successful bringing the full weight of the media machine on turning down news of the previous H1N1 pandemic which had 2 orders of magnitudes more cases and deaths so far. https://www.businessinsider.com/coronavirus-compared-to-sars...

This current pandemic just happened to have happened outside the US so it couldn't keep the lid on the news.

[Juxtapoz]

According to your source

> The coronavirus outbreak is more severe than the 2009 outbreak of H1N1, or swine flu. That illness infected between 700 million and 1.4 billion people worldwide but only had a mortality rate of 0.02%.

1.4 billion worldwide, not just in the United States.

The mortality rate is much worse for coronavirus and it hasn't been around since 2009 so we've yet to see how many cases and deaths occur.

[ganeshkrishnan]

Just an FYI: the mortality rate of swine flu is based on estimate of total people infected (around 60 million cdc estimate) while the mortality rate of covid is from confirmed cases as we don't have estimates of total infection with some speculating that it's 10x of confirmed cases

[im3w1l]

We know from the cruise ships that mortality is in the 0.1% - 1% ballpark. With a broken down healthcare system it may go a bit beyond 1%, but not a lot. Data from Italy shows many people who get a ventilator die anyway, so running out of them wont make the figure jump.

[meddlepal]

This so much. The system is absolutely corrupt and broken to the core. Poor leadership exacerbates the problem but it is not the fault of poor leadership. We've merely been coping with the horrible brokenness of our system for decades.

[kweinber]

I see this logic a lot and I don’t understand it. The current administration dismantled the departments we needed, left whole organizations leaderless, and prompted the brain drain of nearly 1500 scientists from the federal government.

... yet your argument is that they are blameless in the poor performance that followed because of historical factors?

[ianleeclark]

> yet your argument is that they are blameless in the poor performance that followed because of historical factors?

No, they're not blameless, they did all of those things. What is more worrying is a structure wherein actions as sweeping and dangerous as these are possible.

[fzeroracer]

I see posts like this quite a bit, seemingly as a defense of the administration which is known for pushing deep cuts in various institutions, bungling messaging and/or outright lying about the state of affairs, among a litany of other issues which are exceedingly well documented.

If we were to treat the US as a business (as the President would want, apparently), poor leadership is the reason why we're going bankrupt both economically and socially. His actions are akin to cutting the QA department across your various software teams because 'their duties are redundant and can just be done by the developers instead', then encountering a crippling bug that could've been fixed by having QA at inception.

[Beefin]

this is a ridiculous statement, you constantly refer to "him", i can only persume you are referring to our current president. You do know that the U.S. has been increasing debt since way before his tenure, right?

[xbmcuser]

It largely the fault of the current leadership as well as the political party in power. In last 20 years they have destroyed institutions when in power and stopped the other political party to revive them when they were not in power. All the government lockdowns and blocks when Obama/Democratic party wanted to spend money on healthcare are there to see. Though Democrats are not blameless nor is the American public for allowing this to happen.

[roenxi]

Spending money on healthcare wouldn't have helped. You could treble the capacity of the healthcare system and it wouldn't make that much of a difference. No system is ready for 1-3% of the population suddenly requiring weeks of time in a hospital bed.

The countries that are coping with this aren't doing so by putting everyone in great, well funded hospitals. They are avoiding people getting sick through combination of border control, cheap & quick medical testing and infectious disease specialists in key positions.

[xbmcuser]

Spending money on healthcare would have helped. Actually would help now currently in the us doctors and nurses are complaining about lack of protective wear. In reality it is available but hospitals are not buying and providing them to it staff as they are expensive. Had US been investing on healthcare hospitals would not be worried about running out of funds and not protectings its doctors and nurses.

[AlexandrB]

Of the two US political parties, one has an explicitly stated mission to defund, neuter, and shrink public institutions[1]. I don’t think it’s a stretch to blame an institutional crisis on those who want to take credit for the “savings” they’ve achieved by crippling those same institutions.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starve_the_beast

[robomartin]

You are being kind. From my perspective, the ineptitude and mismanagement easily goes back 50 years, not 20.

It's sad to see so many people blinded by the hatred aimed at Trump to be completely blind to how it is we got here. A simple example from data that came out today: Governor Cuomo refused to buy 16,000 ventilators in 2015, when he was told they would be needed for an event such as what we are experiencing. Remember this is when Bill Gates was already on TED talking about the next pandemic. And so, today, Cuomo tries to blame their lack of preparedness on the federal government.

The other item you mentioned that is also right on point, is the brutal erosion of our ability to manufacture almost anything at scale. And then you have people, reporters and politicians yelling and screaming about the Trump administration not materializing masks, bed, ventilators and entire hospitals instantly out of thin air.

I mean, we barely make our own molds for plastic injection molding in the US and we are indignant because we can't spin-up industrial scale manufacturing capacity in days? It takes MONTHS, no, YEARS, to integrate some of these supply chains and produce quality product at scale.

Segments of our society, "leadership" and media are acting as if a combination of Superman and Captain Picard are going to swing into action, instantly materialize millions of products we don't have the industrial base to produce and fly around the planet at ludicrous speed in reverse to turn back time.

Well, that's not reality. Reality is we can't make shit in the US any more and it takes a tremendous amount of time to spin up production lines from nothing, particularly if we are talking about life saving devices.

Everyone needs to calm down, stop pointing fingers and find ways to contribute. As the saying goes, "United we Stand". Time to show what that really means or face failure, as the rest of that phrase predicts.

[greedo]

Most of my life I've been told that government is horrible, and that the most terrifying thing to hear is "I'm from the government, and I'm here to help." When an entire generation hears the demonization of civil service (though not military service), then it's no wonder that we end up with a government that can't serve us.

[someguydave]

Why isn’t there any political will to completely overhaul civil service hiring, pay, qualifications, “tenure”, and so forth?

[sudosysgen]

This will likely get downvoted, but it seems to be the most accurate explanation.

American culture is not able to understand the common good anymore. And it cannot understand the brutality of politics, nor the need to participate in it. This is the age of children of cages, forgotten in a week for the official opposition to complain about civility on Twitter. Meanwhile other Western countries burn tires and flip over cars for a thousand times less. In non Western countries, people stand up to bullets in order to complain about the government. But this country made mean people on Twitter the main issue in the election cycle, above Healthcare, War and Concentration camps.

The American public has grown soft, largely by design.

[Proziam]

I'm going to give a very cynical response to this, but I believe all of these factors are relevant. I'm also going to be going against the grain of the political leaning of this forum. I hope that we can discuss the points where we agree and avoid getting stuck at the first point of disagreement.

Factors:

1. Typically, people who wish to be in power are not the people who really want to use power for some greater good. Police make great examples because their abuses of power are often made visible, but this issue goes all the way up to the top. To give an example from right this moment, that I'm sure withstands bipartisan scrutiny, just look at how much political posturing and hot air has stalled the Covid-19 stimulus that is currently being negotiated. [1]The last proposal from the dems included identity politics and various climate provisions. Whether you agree with the policies or not doesn't really matter in this case, what sense does it make to fight for these policies right now in this bill?

2. Our political system centralizes all decision-making power into two parties. Each party has massive influence and control, even to the point of 'rigging' their own internal election processes. As such, the average American has substantially less ability to influencer outcomes at the upper tiers of government as they often think they do. This is the reason there was such distrust of parties by the founding fathers. The solution to this is to either have unlimited parties (requires a different voting system, of which there are several viable options) or to have no parties at all. Then there is a need to institute concepts like a public veto/vote for when things go haywire (think Brexit, but ideally without the intentional political incompetence).

3. Removing those in power is a scary affair. If your government decides to do heinous (or criminally stupid) things and there's no 'political will' at the top to change course, the people must intervene. How much peaceful recourse is there? There are finite 'legal' moves to be made, and they all take time. Once you run out of those options or time, the only remaining choices are 'illegal' and thus risky to individuals - and therefore require large groups of people to organize.

This is a problem understood by our founders, evident in their writings. It's also been commonly addressed since the 1800s in sayings like: [2]"There are four boxes to be used in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."

4. Both parties in the United States, despite their protestations to the contrary, have proven to have corruption up to their highest levels. [3]Both Democrats and Republicans dumped stock running up to the current crisis - after they were briefed about the risks. There's also intense 'fighting' over entirely manufactured issues. [4]One example I use often is "assault weapons," which are used to commit murder less than half as often as people's fists. It's hard to even imagine how much progress could be made if the same political energy were expended on more impactful social issues. (Targeting poverty which leads to desperation and organized crime might be a good start).

[1]https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-pelosi-schumer-contagion-11...

[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_boxes_of_liberty

[3]https://www.politico.com/news/2020/03/21/coronavirus-trading...

[4]https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2017/crime-in-the-u.s.-...

[someguydave]

I would argue Congress’ power is weak compared to the career civil servants who decide whether policy should actually be implemented or not. Popular politics serves as a complete distraction while unelected bureaucrats make most of the decisions behind the scenes.

[robomartin]

> I'm also going to be going against the grain of the political leaning of this forum. I hope that we can discuss the points where we agree and avoid getting stuck at the first point of disagreement.

I agree 100% with the points you made. These are important points to understand, each with its own set of tentacles and consequences. It is also true that HN (and other fora frequented by a younger generation) tends to lean heavily towards an ideological framework that, from my perspective, tends to be the result of the intense indoctrination our educational institutions have been shoveling for decades.

> 1. Typically, people who wish to be in power are not the people who really want to use power for some greater good.

This is universally true anywhere in the world. Politics is not a profession where altruism reigns. Even with Trump, this is only my opinion, I believe he decided to run because Obama put him down and diminished him in a very public way during that famous WH dinner. Once in the race, and particularly once he won, he clearly decided to do a good job. He has a record for being the only politician who has, so far, delivered on everything he promised during the campaign. Is he altruistic? Well, no, I don't think so. He is as self serving as anyone else, but at least he is (was?) getting important things done.

> does it make to fight for these policies right now in this bill?

I was absolutely baffled by the strategic blunder. Is Pelosi so powerful that nobody dared go against her? What they did is nothing more than sheer madness, not to mention the disgusting stench of using a national emergency of this magnitude to strong-arm the other side into adding irrelevant items to an economic rescue plan.

> 2. Our political system centralizes all decision-making power into two parties.

I've been saying for a long time that our system of government is obsolete. It had a good run, but this makes no sense. A simple example pulled out of the current environment is the gate-keeping of medical decisions by a bunch of 70 year old lawyers in the Senate and a hodge-podge of people in the House. To me it would make sense to decentralize this power and, effectively, have "Vice Presidents" and teams who are not political parties to manage important areas of our country. In other words, you would have a VP of Health and an executive team under him/her. The fact that someone like Trump or Pelosi have power over medical/healthcare policy and actions is a failure of the system.

> soap, ballot, jury, and ammo

The second option should be the most powerful one. However, as we have seen both in the US and elsewhere, the masses are easily manipulated, which can lead to bad decisions. My canonical example of this is the whole Bernie business. In a rational society he would have been laughed out of the political stage decades ago. Yet, here he is. I am not sure how to counter irrationality other than to somehow push hard to change our system of education for greater balance and critical thinking, a task that would not deliver results for a decade or two.

[wutbrodo]

This is an odd conclusion to draw. You're saying that people call the government incompetent, and now they're demonstrating incompetence, and you're convinced that the causality flows from the former to the latter?

[atq2119]

As an external observer, I think it's not so much about whether the current US government is incompetent or not, although of course that does play some role. The key point is that a large fraction of USians have a purely ideological belief that government cannot ever be good.

As a consequence, too large a fraction of the population and of political leadership don't even try to make government institutions better, and are instead actively standing in the way of people who do try. Instead, they end up dismantling institutions or making them worse when they fail to dismantle them. (Note that this is the semi-official policy of one of your major parties. They call it "starve the beast".)

And yes, this is genuinely different from other countries. Over here, while trust in institutions is often lower than it would ideally be, the vast majority consensus at least of political and media leadership is that government can and should be good. As a consequence there's a significant number of people over here genuinely trying to make better government happen, to at least some success.

It's really no surprise that US government is so dysfunctional, and it's entirely self-inflicted by bad culture.

[wutbrodo]

> As an external observer, I think it's not so much about whether the current US government is incompetent or not, although of course that does play some role. The key point is that a large fraction of USians have a purely ideological belief that government cannot ever be good.

I'd be wary of outgroup homogeneity bias here. I'm a fairly big-government guy; there are plenty of things the market is sorely ill-equipped to handle where active, competent govt can do tons of good.

But unlike most people on the big-govt side of the discussion, I don't think that it's blasphemy to question why the US govt is so especially incompetent in certain areas (infra construction is a glaring example, etc). Waving it away as "they don't have enough funding to do good things" is undetermined, the kind of answer that people reach for because it seems obvious, not because it's correct (or rather, complete).

While I've decided that big govt is, in many cases, worth the inefficiency, it's still worth asking _why_ it's inefficient and whether we can improve this. I also don't begrudge some very smart friends of mine who've decided that its inefficiency means that decentralizing power is a better path forward. I can guarantee you that all the people I've talked to who feel that way have given it far more thought than the simple-minded stereotypes the GP comment engages in.

[x0x0]

The role of the federal government is to be our insurer and to eat risk. Unlike state governments, there is no balanced budget requirement. Blaming Cuomo -- ie all 50 individual states, with not only currently varying populations, but populations and incomes and risks that vary over time -- for not independently staffing up and buying equipment to be prepared against all eventualities is silly.

Second, Trump diddled for 8-12 weeks to start manufacturing things. People are screaming because the Chinese government confirmed by Dec 31 that they had cases of the virus. That means the NSA had almost certainly been hearing about it for a couple weeks. Given the worlds' experience with SARS and MERS, that was the time to get serious.

What was possible with this warning? Taiwan, for example, used this time to create 32 new production lines [1] for masks.

Later, there were classified briefings that Republicans like Senator Burr were privately warning businesses about. While lying to the public and using the warning period not to get serious about dealing with the pandemic but to save money.

We had 8-12 weeks of warning, and Trump either took no serious action or deliberately delayed decisive action to start figuring out supply lines of respirators or ventilators. We had, to use your phrase, "MONTHS" -- actually a quarter of a year -- and Trump squandered them.

He invoked the Defense Production Act YESTERDAY for god's sake. The time to do that was when it became clear containment had failed. Ie sometime around mid-January.

ps -- we make plenty of stuff in the US. in reality, the US is the second largest manufacturer in the world after China. That's not to say that manufacturing isn't declining in the united states, but to pretend the enormous set of US manufacturers doesn't exist is not grounded in facts.

See also BLS 51-4111 -- 72k employed in the US in tool & die manufacturing.

[1] https://focustaiwan.tw/society/202003230016

[nocorpwelfare]

All correct. Also, Snowflakes think the country can run all shut down, but not if you want food on your table. We have to get back going, take our hits, and survive. The alternative is worse.

[specialist]

"The CDC and FDA were in territorial pissing matches with one another around test regulation."

This is normal. In every org at every level.

It's leadership's job to knock heads, to span boundaries and turf and inertia, to make everyone play nicely together.

"Buck stops here" and all that.

[seneca]

I agree with what you've said here. I'm curious if you have thoughts as to an underlying cause, or causes, that you would be willing to share.

[gojomo]

Yes, it's not just the current heel in the top job, but there were a lot of unforced errors owing to his team's problems.

Trump's a germaphobe, & a deregulator, & big on border security.

But he left the pandemic office in the White House go unfilled, & his CDC eliminated an in-China monitoring position, & he proposed additional cuts.

After initially considering people like FDA critic & aggressive deregulator Balaji Srinivasan as FDA Chair, that was ignored as a priority – & FDA delays in approving alternate, distributed diagnostics added weeks or months of delay to testing capabilities. Even now FDA inspection delays have medical supplies from reliable, longtime suppliers held from delivery. The steps the FDA has finally taken are waivers they could have granted by administrative fiat months ago. And key discoveries of community-spread in the US required researchers to disregard CDC guidance. (The agency designed to sound the alarm had instead removed the batteries from the smoke detector!)

And while countries with a sense of seriousness about foreign disease threats have closely monitored visitors by origin-of-travel, recent countries visited, and fever-monitoring from early-on, even when Italy was in full outbreak there were no health-screenings or fever-monitoring on US arrivals from there. Trump responded late, with crude bans by entire country-of-origin, even when those countries have no greater prevalence-of-community-spread than the US itself.

So yes, the rot is deep and crosses multiple administrations. But the current Administration is also especially inept, even in areas like disease, deregulation, and borders where they've touted their vigilance.