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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

• meddlepal 6y ago
  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 6y ago
    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 6y ago
      > 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 6y ago
    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 6y ago
      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 6y ago
    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 6y ago
      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 6y ago
        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.
• omgwtfbyobbq 6y ago
  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-cdc-exclusiv/exclusive-u-s-axed-cdc-expert-job-in-china-months-before-virus-outbreak-idUSKBN21910S https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-china-... https://blog.ucsusa.org/anita-desikan/trump-administration-has-hindered-ability-to-respond-to-coronavirus https://blog.ucsusa.org/anita-desikan/trump-administration-h...
  • vvanders 6y ago
    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.
  • DocSavage 6y ago
    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 6y ago
      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.
  • xster 6y ago
    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-swine-flu-mers-zika-2020-3 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.
• seneca 6y ago
  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.
  • extralego 6y ago
    Neoliberalism
• robomartin 6y ago
  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 6y ago
    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 6y ago
      Why isn’t there any political will to completely overhaul civil service hiring, pay, qualifications, “tenure”, and so forth?
• Reedx 6y ago
  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-future-discontents/annoyance-or-armageddon/ https://americanmind.org/features/the-coronacrisis-and-our-f...
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
• specialist 6y ago
  "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.
• gojomo 6y ago
  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.
• AlexandrB 6y ago
  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 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starve_the_beast