rxwine Member since: Oct 24, 2012 Threads: 200 Posts: 20764 | Quote: (1) Why do governments (and their leaders) fail to adequately address known vulnerabilities and credible warnings about escalating threats and hazards? (2) Why was the Trump Administration unable or unwilling to respond vigilantly to a long‐forecasted pandemic despite widespread awareness of the general threat and credible and conclusive advanced warning regarding the specific COVID‐19 outbreak? (3) Can concepts and frameworks derived from the literature on “strategic surprise” help explain preparedness and warning‐response failures in the health security domain?
To explore the first question, we deployed a tripartite framework based on our previous work on warning‐response failure (Parker et al., 2009; Parker & Stern, 2002, 2005), emphasizing a combination of psychological (cognitive and motivational bias), bureau‐organizational (organizational fragmentation, competition, and turf concerns), and agenda‐political factors (prioritization of attention and resources and competitive framing). This literature suggests that discernible patterns of denial, disorganization, and distraction, as well as bureaucratic conflict, and the politicization of threat assessment and policy measures go a long way in explaining historical warning‐response failures.
Regarding the second question, factors associated with these three perspectives shed considerable light on the dynamics that contributed to the Trump Administration's failure to proactively address the threat and effectively manage the pandemic and—by extension—to the comparatively high toll of lives lost in the US during that period. As suggested in the apt title of a recent paper by Platje et al. (2020), the COVID‐19 pandemic appears to have been “both an expected and unexpected event.” However, many of the critical challenges that vexed the Trump Administration's response were not only foreseeable but were, in fact, foreseen.
The empirical results from this study of the Trump Administration's response to the COVID‐19 pandemic, much like the ones reported from previous cases of strategic surprise and policy failure, such as 9/11 or the Hurricane Katrina response (Parker et al., 2009; Parker & Stern, 2002, 2005), suggest that leadership is a key underlying determinant in all three perspectives. Leaders, like their followers, are human and susceptible to the various forms of cognitive and motivational biases outlined above. Furthermore, leaders set the tone not only for their advisory groups and networks but to a large extent for the wider executive branch bureaucracies as well (George & Stern, 2002; Preston, 2001; Preston & 't Hart, 1999; Stern & Sundelius, 1997).
Malignant forms of bureaucratic politics flourish and organizational logjams persist when leaders (or their surrogates) fail to create a transparent interagency decision‐making process, cut through the red tape, or set constructive norms for policy discourse (Rosati, 2000). Donald Trump and his top officials failed to provide scientifically informed, normative leadership, resulting in fierce infighting between multiple power centers, blame‐shifting, ambiguity regarding who was in charge, and a delayed, disorganized response to the pandemic.
Finally, from an agenda‐political perspective, although others may be more or less skillful in securing access and making their cases for preferred policies, the buck stops in the Oval Office. The definitive duty for setting the political and policy agenda rests with the White House. When the executive initially suggests that the stock market and not public health is of the utmost importance and makes it clear that bad news is unwelcome, shifting priorities and rapidly responding and adjusting to new information becomes difficult. At the end of the day, presidents are responsible for (although not entirely in control of) the political agenda.
Responding to pandemics is challenging, and many countries struggled to manage the COVID‐19 crisis (Boin et al., 2021). It is also important to recognize that not all of the problems of the US response can be laid at the feet of President Trump. As we showed above, the CDC's initial testing failures resulted from institutional ills that were independent of the president, and the pandemic revealed dysfunction and institutional rot at the CDC and FDA that predated the Trump Administration (Gottlieb, 2021). However, despite favorable circumstances—sufficient early warning, substantial capacity, a venerable center for disease control and prevention, vast resources, high‐quality laboratories, and world‐leading scientific expertise—the Trump Administration demonstrated incompetence in responding to and managing the SARS‐CoV‐2 outbreak.
The US, although it represents just 4% of the world's population, accounted for over 20% of all confirmed COVID‐19 cases and deaths worldwide that took place on Trump's watch (Johns Hopkins University, 2022). This outcome was not inevitable. With a timelier, focused, scientifically informed, and sustained whole‐of‐government response, it has been estimated that hundreds of thousands of COVID‐19 deaths could have been avoided (Redlener et al., 2020; Woolhandler et al., 2021). Ultimately, in the US system, as the commander‐in‐chief, presidents are responsible for the decisions the federal government makes or fails to make, the mobilization and coordination of the federal response to national crises, and setting and enforcing the proper priorities. In the final analysis, when it comes to assessing responsibility for the avoidable failures of the federal government's COVID‐19 performance, the evidence examined here indicates that, while not responsible for everything that went wrong, President Trump was a decisive factor behind the tragically sub‐optimal US pandemic response.
Regarding the third question, there are considerable similarities in the patterns underlying warning‐response failures in the military, homeland security, emergency management, and health security realms. While perhaps counter‐intuitive, this is not particularly surprising as the warning‐response framework applied in this paper departs from enduring and empirically well‐documented features of the human mind, organizations, and the political environment typical of crisis management in the US and other highly developed countries (OECD, 2015; Parker et al., 2009).
For this reason, a natural next step in this line of research would be to apply the framework systematically to a variety of other contingencies such as cyberattacks and information operations (Francois & Lin, 2021) in order to demonstrate further and delineate the scope—and limitations of applicability—pertaining to the approach and formulate propositions about the relative importance of the “cuts” (and the particular mechanisms identified within them) across issue areas and circumstances. In our view, there is an opportunity for mid‐range theory development based on the rigorous comparison of warning‐response failures in different policy domains.
Finally, because we are interested in a knowledge base that can contribute to the avoidance of the types of failures analyzed here, like others before us (Bovens & 't Hart, 2016; McConnell, 2011), we believe there is a need for more studies that diagnose both failure and success. Understanding failure remains essential, but there is more work to be done with medium‐n comparative case designs that study the dynamics of policy success compared with those of failure. The quest to enhance societal security demands we embrace the challenge of learning from crisis management successes and failures. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9115435/ "Facts are whatever I say they are." - Trump |