Two
days after his inauguration in January 2017, President Trump imposed a hiring
freeze on the federal government. Within four months, the Centers for Disease
Control had 700 vacancies that handicapped infectious disease prevention and
control, and impeded aid to localities for emergency readiness. High-level
positions in science and policy went unfilled.
Since then,
every Trump budget has sought to slash the CDC’s budget: by 17 percent for
fiscal year 2018, by 20 percent for fiscal year 2019, 20 percent for fiscal
2020, and even now—amid the coronavirus—by 15% for fiscal 2021. This after
Trump in 2018 dissolved the National Security Council’s global health security
team, which existed to manage precisely the kind of outbreak we are now
experiencing.
This
might seem odd for a germaphobe like Trump. But it fits neatly into the
destructive agenda of the extreme right-wing radicals who have taken over the
Republican Party, who aim for the “deconstruction of the administrative state,”
in the words of Trump’s former chief strategist, Steve Bannon.
More
aggressively than any other Republican administration, Trump’s has emasculated
regulatory departments, moved to shred decades of environmental and worker-safety
regulations, shredded enforcement of consumer protection and anti-discrimination
laws, and tried to tear bigger holes in the social safety net.
In addition, Trump, Vice President
Pence, and other officials have made sure to plant legions of unqualified
political appointees in the upper ranks of multiple agencies, producing a
perfect storm of neglect and
incompetence. This becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy by discrediting
government as less significant and less effective, which feeds a spiral of
discontent and alienation about “Washington” and government in general. The conservative
agenda of shrinking the public sector thereby gains public support.
