State and Locals Pick up the Slack as White House Flails

Coronavirus is spreading across the United States, but there’s nothing united about the response. With the Trump administration seemingly most focused on downplaying the outbreak, states and cities and businesses are making their own decisions about what preventive measures to impose, rather than working in a coordinated way with uniform standards. It's a mess.

“There’s no systematic plan of when a city should close school, when they should tell businesses that they have to telework, when they should close movie theaters and cancel large gatherings,” Dr. Scott Gottlieb, former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, said on Face the Nation Sunday. “We leave these decisions to local officials, but we really should have a comprehensive plan in terms of recommendations to cities and in some support from the federal government for cities that make that step." 

In the meantime, things are looking worse inside the White House.   A new Vanity Fair write-up paints a bleak picture of Donald J. Trump's state of mind, as the coronavirus pandemic looks primed to explode in the United States despite Dear Leader's demands that his staff ignore it into submission. By "bleak picture," we mean that the malignant narcissist in chief appears headed for a total breakdown.

We are told that Trump wants his attorney general to "open investigations of the media for market manipulation" for their reports about the virus. We are told that Trump is "very frustrated he doesn't have a good team around him," despite Trump picking every last one of those incompetent suck-ups himself. We are told that Trump is pining for ex-deputy chief of staff Bill Shine because Trump is furious about how the cameras made him look during his recent Fox News town hall.

And now comes news of further chaos in the federal response,  as the Trump administration clashes with airline officials in a pitched battle over the response to the coronavirus crisis.

Trump administration officials and aviation executives have battled over the administration's demand that airlines collect new kinds of data from passengers.  Airlines say they can't meet that demand right away -- according to several CNN sources, the conference calls have deteriorated so badly that federal officials have issued threats, thrown out expletives and accused airline executives of lying. It is an "epic battle," said one source familiar with the talks.

On one call, an administration officials threatened the executives with fines of $500,00 and jail time if the airlines didn't comply, according to two sources.  Centers for Disease Control and Prevention officials have even threatened recommending that the administration try to ground planes in the US if they can't get the passenger data, according to another source.

The administration officials' vitriol has left airline officials in a state of "shock and disbelief," one source said. Government officials have displayed "a lot of ignorance about what is possible."   Airlines, concerned about complicated privacy issues the data collection may pose, have tried to meet the administration halfway, proposing to develop an app and website for data collection.

The standoff over data goes back years, said one source added that the CDC seems to be using the coronavirus outbreak as a lever to force airlines to agree to its demands.  Initially, the administration told airlines they had to comply with a directive to ask travelers a series of 22 fields of information when checking in for a flight--  but narrowed that to five questions about passengers' contact info.

Aviation executives said they don't have the technology to do that digitally, explaining it would take six months to make the necessary technical fixes. They could, however, use paper, they said. An official from the Centers for Disease Control accused the airlines of lying, leaving the industry executives reeling in shock.

Experts say it took the U.S. aviation industry two years to meet post-9/11 requirements, which also involved data collection.  In addition, airlines are concerned that the proposed data collection rules give no clear end-date on the data collection and worry that the U.S. government could continue forcing them to collect it "for other purposes."

The airlines -- particularly their lawyers -- are worried about what Customs and Border Protection officials will do with all the additional information after the coronavirus crisis is over.  They are also concerned about lawsuits from other countries, particularly given European Union privacy restrictions.

In light of those concerns, the airlines asked the Trump officials if the government would back them in the event of lawsuits and were told the administration would offer no support,.   One source added that one U.S. official told aviation executives their privacy concerns were "bullshit" because no country would push back on the collection of information given the threat CoVID19 poses.

The Trump administration should actually start screening incoming flights from international hot spots and focus on increasing testing capacity and support for patients and hospitals.  Forget about helping the cruise industry and help people.  Forget about cutting payroll taxes-- people without jobs and retired people don't even pay payroll taxes.  How much incompetency can we tolerate?