America was unprepared for a major crisis. Again.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/america-was-unprepared-for-a-major-crisis-again/2020/04/04/df85c0da-75d9-11ea-87da-77a8136c1a6d_story.html

By Dan Balz
April 4, 2020 at 6:09 p.m. EDT

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“We always wait for the crisis to happen,” said Leon Panetta, who served in government as secretary of defense, director of the CIA, White House chief of staff, director of the Office of Management and Budget and a member of the House. “I know the human failings we’re dealing with, but the responsibility of people elected to these jobs is to make sure we are not caught unawares.”

In interviews over the past two weeks, senior officials from administrations of both parties, many with firsthand experience in dealing with major crises, suggest that the president and his administration have fallen short of nearly every standard a government should try to meet.

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Leadership is important, and President Trump will have on his record what he did and didn’t do in the early stages of this particular crisis. But the problems go far broader and deeper than what a president does. Lack of planning and preparation contribute, but so too does bureaucratic inertia as well as fear among career officials of taking risks. Turnover in personnel robs government of historical knowledge and expertise. The process of policymaking-on-the-fly is less robust than it once was. Politics, too, gets in the way.

Long ago, this was far less the case, a time when the United States projected competence and confidence around the globe, said Philip Zelikow, a professor at the University of Virginia who served in five administrations and was executive director of the 9/11 Commission.

“America had the reputation of being non-ideological, super pragmatic, problem solvers, par excellence,” he said. “This image of the United States was an earned image, of people seeing America do almost a wondrous series of things. . . . We became known as the can-do country. If you contrast that with the image of the U.S. today, it’s kind of depressing.”

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Andrew H. Card Jr. was secretary of transportation in the administration of President George H.W. Bush. When Hurricane Andrew hit Florida and there was criticism of the federal response, Bush tapped Card to go to Florida and take charge. He spent seven weeks there.

He found resistance within the bureaucracy to bend the rules. “I found that FEMA is a great organization, but they were all afraid to do things that weren’t, quote, by the book,” Card said. “FEMA was always being challenged . . . second-guessed after a disaster.”

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Lack of integration — public health with emergency management with economic assistance — across the government creates other obstacles. So too does turnover in personnel or vacancies in key positions, which has been a continuing problem particularly in this administration.

“If you do not have people who do not remember the lessons learned and you don’t have people who have navigated these enough to have relationships across the government, you can be hampered,” said Mark Harvey, former senior director for resilience policy at the National Security Council. “You never want to be exchanging business cards at a disaster scene.”

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Success goes beyond a president’s capacity to engage and move the bureaucracy. A top-down system inhibits quick action when needed. Experts in disaster management suggest that a functional system empowers officials farther down in the government to act without having been ordered to do so. Coordination must be at higher levels of government; response should be at a much lower level.