Frustrated Trump considers naming coronavirus ‘czar’

President Donald Trump has privately expressed frustration to numerous officials about his administration’s efforts to stop a possible domestic outbreak of the coronavirus and has discussed appointing a “czar” to manage the administration’s response, according to someone familiar with his comments.

>>Noah Weiland, Maggie Haberman and Emily CochraneThe New York Times
Published : 27 Feb 2020, 04:43 AM
Updated : 27 Feb 2020, 04:43 AM

But a mixed public message emerged Wednesday from the White House as a spokesman denied that Trump was looking to hire a White House coronavirus coordinator, saying the president was “pleased” with the work that Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar was doing as the head of a task force overseeing the response.

Still, the administration has been struggling with a sluggish reaction, even if Trump has been reluctant to give in to what he considers an “alarmist” view about the virus, an administration official said. Azar, testifying before a House subcommittee, confirmed Wednesday afternoon a new case in the United States, bringing the total to 60 who have been infected here. Azar said that health officials were still figuring out how the new person became infected.

The president has called a news conference for 6 pm to discuss the virus and has publicly praised his administration’s response. On Wednesday morning, he condemned the news media, saying journalists were making the coronavirus “look as bad as possible.” Contradicting some government experts who see the coronavirus threat as only beginning, he is still convinced that, like the flu, the new coronavirus will dissipate with warmer, more humid weather.

The possibility of the virus spreading in the United States comes as the administration grapples with cuts and personnel moves that critics say have weakened the system for dealing with such health crises. The White House in 2018 eliminated a dedicated position on the National Security Council to coordinate pandemic response, the same year that the Trump administration dramatically narrowed its epidemiological work from 49 countries to 10.

In November, a task force at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, which included five current and former Republican senators and House members, warned that “the United States remains woefully ill-prepared to respond to global health security threats” and recommended the reinstatement of an NSC coordinator and a recommitment of funding and attention to global health programmes.

Instead, the president’s budget request this month for the fiscal year that begins in October would slash the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention’s budget by almost 16% and the Health and Human Services Department’s by almost 10%. The proposal’s $3 billion in cuts to global health programs included a 53% cut to the World Health Organisation and a 75% cut to the Pan American Health Organisation.

It has fallen to Azar to make the case that the government is up to the task of containing a virus that has infected more than 80,000 people globally and killed nearly 3,000. For a second day, Azar was on Capitol Hill on Wednesday defending his work, telling lawmakers that he was overseeing “the smoothest interagency process I’ve experienced in my 20 years of dealing with public health emergencies.”

“The president and I spoke this morning as he returned from India, and he said, ‘I want to continue being radically transparent. When you come over to brief me this evening, let’s sit and invite the press in,’ ” he told a House committee as he testified about his department’s budget.

Trump’s reassurances appear at least in part aimed at calming global markets. A day after its worst one-day slide in two years, the S&P 500 closed down 3% Tuesday, a decline that put the index deeper in the red for 2020.

On Wednesday, Moody’s Analytics predicted a 40% chance that the virus will break containment in China and grow into a global pandemic that would push the United States and the world into a recession. Its chief economist, Mark Zandi, said in a research note that he expected the virus to reduce US economic growth by 0.2 percentage point this year — and that a “black swan” recession now looked uncomfortably possible.

“The economy was already fragile before the outbreak and vulnerable to anything that did not stick to script,” he wrote. “COVID-19 is way off script.”

With Cabinet secretaries fanned out on Capitol Hill, Wednesday featured more sharp questioning about the administration’s preparedness for the virus. Chad F Wolf, acting secretary of homeland security, was asked in another House hearing by Rep Henry Cuellar, whether his department had the necessary resources and funding.

“There is now community transmission in a number of countries outside Asia, which is deeply concerning,” Azar told House lawmakers Wednesday. “We expect to see more cases here.”

Azar said that the CDC has already exhausted the $105 million rapid response fund that the federal government had been using in its initial response efforts. He has proposed shifting $136 million from other health programs to the coronavirus to replenish the government’s efforts.

“It’s a very fast-moving process,” he said.

Azar faced bipartisan concern about the administration’s request for additional funding, as top lawmakers and staff began discussions on an emergency spending package — a package that is expected to be much larger than the $2.5 billion request the White House submitted Monday evening.

Lawmakers from both parties have said the White House request is far short of what is needed. It includes less than $2 billion in new funding and relies on the transfer of existing funds — including $535 million intended to counter the spread of the Ebola virus. In a briefing Tuesday morning with senators, administration officials said that they understood that the package would need to grow, according to a Senate aide familiar with the exchange but unauthorized to discuss publicly.

Rep Rosa DeLauro, chairwoman of the House Appropriations subcommittee that funds health programs, criticized the White House’s funding proposals as “unacceptable.”

“We want to be supportive,” she told Azar.

Rep Mark Pocan, asked Azar if he would accept some of the $3.8 billion in federal defence funds that had been redirected to the construction of a wall on the southern border.

“I don’t believe that the administration would be supportive of that,” Azar said with a chuckle. “But Congress will make the decisions.”

Sen Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic minority leader, proposed Wednesday to increase the president’s emergency request drastically, to $8.5 billion in new funds.

When he announced his coronavirus proposal Wednesday morning, Schumer pointed to the $6 billion Congress appropriated for a 2006 flu pandemic and the $7 billion it carved out for the H1N1 flu in 2009. His plan includes $3 billion for a public health emergency fund, $1.5 billion for the CDC, $1 billion for vaccine development and $2 billion for reimbursing states and cities for efforts they have so far made to monitor and prepare for potential cases of the virus.

The politics of coronavirus shifted drastically Tuesday when Dr Nancy Messonnier, director of the CDC’s National Centre for Immunisation and Respiratory Diseases, told reporters that “it’s not so much of a question of if this will happen anymore but rather more of a question of exactly when this will happen.”

She said that hospitals and schools should begin preparing for an outbreak and that she had even spoken to her own family about a “significant disruption of our lives.”

On Tuesday, Azar told a Senate panel that medical supplies were badly needed for the nation’s emergency stockpile, including 300 million masks for health care workers alone, he said.

Trump’s attempts to calm the American public have also occasionally been laced with a degree of alarm.

“There’s a very good chance you’re not going to die,” Trump said about the outbreak at a news conference in India on Tuesday.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi, asked about Trump’s claims that the coronavirus was under control, told reporters, “I don’t think the president knows what he’s talking about — once again.”

She later dismissed Trump’s efforts as “late — too late, anaemic.”

“Hopefully we can make up for the loss of time,” Pelosi said Wednesday. “But it has to have the professionals in place, the resources that are adequate, and not using scare tactics about people coming back to our country.”

Lawmakers have expressed alarm that the Trump administration has yet to appoint a czarlike position at the White House, which President Barack Obama did in 2014 to handle the Ebola virus. That role, and a global health expert slot on the National Security Council, have been vacant for years.

“This is probably something that justifies having one person in the government who can work cross the various departments and agencies,” said Sen Mitt Romney. “It would make sense to have a single person who is in charge of our national response.”

Sen Mazie Hirono said Tuesday as she left a briefing with federal health officials that she was not sure who was actually on the administration’s task force.

“This is why we do need somebody that’s like a coronavirus czar as we had during the Ebola situation,” she said.

Azar defended his role in front of a House panel Wednesday morning, saying he was working every day with Trump and Mick Mulvaney, the acting White House chief of staff.

Ronald Klain, who held the Ebola position in the Obama White House, said, “One Cabinet secretary cannot run an interagency response. Azar has the biggest civilian job in the American government. Is he doing this in his spare time?”

At the Wednesday hearing on the health department’s budget, lawmakers questioned Azar about public health-related cuts the Trump administration had proposed, in addition to his plans to fund the coronavirus response, for which the White House had sought billions of dollars from Congress.

A chart obtained by The New York Times on Tuesday showed that Azar was proposing shuffling money from key health programmes to fund the administration’s response, including some that were central to Trump’s agenda, like HIV and AIDS prevention, rural health, and cancer research.

The 2021 health and human services budget calls for broader public health cuts separate from the White House’s plans to transfer money to handle coronavirus efforts. Tens of millions of dollars would come from the department’s Office of Public Health Preparedness and Response and its Hospital Preparedness Programme, which helps hospitals handle surges of patients during disease outbreaks.

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