The Federal Response to COVID-19: Lessons from the Pandemic

When the first suspected human-to-human transmission of the novel coronavirus was reported in January 2020, the United States had in place an elaborate set of pandemic disaster and response plans that spanned hundreds of pages. The George W. Bush administration spearheaded national pandemic planning in 2005 as part of the post-September 11 efforts to modernize the country's disaster response capabilities. Subsequent administrations revisited and revised the various pandemic plans, including the Trump administration as recently as 2017 and 2018. Despite these detailed plans, the Trump administration was slow to respond to the emerging public health crisis or implement any of the prescribed protocols. Federal officials lost valuable time as they downplayed the risk posed by COVID-19 and repeatedly assured the American people that the virus would simply "go away." By March 2020, a frightening spike in cases in the Northeast made the pandemic impossible to ignore. President Trump and other administration officials shifted tactics and began to characterize COVID-19 as the quintessential "black swan"-a threat that no one could have foreseen. President Trump repeatedly told the American people that "no one could have predicted something like this" even though official federal policy suggested a very different story. Far from being a black swan, the COVID-19 pandemic was widely anticipated and, according to many epidemiologists, inevitable. This Article argues that our botched federal response was not so much a failure of policy per se, but rather a failure of political will. The federal government had a robust pandemic policy in place; it simply chose not to follow it. This failure of political will illustrates the dangers that arise when public health measures are politicized and weaponized for partisan advantage and demands strong interventions to ensure federal accountability and transparency. The first Part of this article outlines the evolution of our national pandemic plans within the broader context of disaster and response planning. The second Part explains the pandemic staging framework that is used to organize and coordinate decisionmaking within a pandemic. The third Part charts the federal response during the crucial first three months of the public health crisis, specifically identifying instances where the federal government failed to follow its own clearly articulated pandemic policy. The final Part outlines some lessons learned from the pandemic and proposes reforms to insulate public health measures from partisan wrangling and keep our federal government faithful to its foremost obligation; namely, to promote the general welfare.