Government Big Enough for the Next Pandemic
By Albert B. Kelly
A little over two decades ago, a fellow named Grover Norquist, advocating for smaller government and tax reform, was quoted as saying "My goal is to cut government in half in twenty-five years, to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub." Two decades, two wars, a financial crisis and a global pandemic later, my guess is that the federal government is not of a decent size for drowning, but then again I’m not sure it should be after 2 years of this pandemic.
We are undoubtedly sick of hearing about the pandemic and we’ve certainly had our fill of adjusting to it, whether that involves shut-downs, masks, vaccines, variants, quarantines, and whatever else attaches to this new normal we face. And yet, for all of that I hope the federal government will prepare for the next one, whether it comes in the form of a Covid variant or some brand new thing we’ve yet to imagine.
Reflecting on the past 2 years involving two administrations, there may be quite a number of things the federal government got wrong in its pandemic response. There is a case to be made that early on in the pandemic the purchase of PPE and equipment was an absolute disaster. Rather than the federal government serving as the procurement agent for the states, and yes even a shipping clerk if need be, the federal government left the states to compete against each other on everything from masks to ventilators. As if that were not bad enough, there were instances when states actually did secure shipments of these supplies and equipment only to have the federal government swoop in and seize it at the point of delivery.
Where states were left to compete against each other in the purchase of this stuff primarily from foreign sources, it drove up the price to loan shark levels. The other thing it did was create enormous delays. The thing is we’ll never know how many people got sick and how many lives we lost because of this chaos in trying to purchase PPE and ventilators and medicines at the leading edge of the crisis. We will never be able to trace the lines back and say with certainty that this nurse got sick or that patient died because that shipment didn’t make it to this hospital, but we know it happened.
The answer isn’t government small enough to drown in a bathtub and it’s not necessarily larger government, what we have is plenty big, but government with enough integrity, vigilance, and competence to prepare for the next pandemic. What does that look like? For starters, it might involve creating capacity here at home. I don’t know about anyone else, but I’ll feel awfully vulnerable should the main suppliers of medicines and medical equipment be workers at companies in countries under governments that we don’t control, who view us with distrust, see us as a potential enemy, or whatever.
Let’s build capacity here at home and if this involves government-backed guarantees to private companies to ramp up production, then so be it. Next is the national stock pile. Let’s have one that’s up to date, not dry-rotted, and of sufficient size to get us through the first wave of whatever hits us while industry here in this country gets cranked up.
On another front, the government put an awfully large amount of money out on the street to keep businesses and households afloat. I think this was the right thing to do, but I think they can do it better. We did not have the infrastructure to vet and distribute these funds properly. That’s how we get the middle-aged woman in Somerset County with phantom employees bilking us taxpayers to the tune $1 million so she could buy herself a BMW SUV or the guy in Stamford, Connecticut who used coronavirus relief money to get himself a Porsche and Mercedes among other things.
At the same time, I’m guessing there were a sizable number of legitimate small businesses, landlords, and households that desperately needed relief that didn’t get a whiff of it or if they did, didn’t get enough. If I’m right about any of this, then the federal government should do a serious post-mortem on all aspects of the pandemic response and maybe resist the temptation to make it about partisan politics while they’re at it. Assuming they’re big enough.