Inexperience mars feds’ response
Too many key jobs vacant as huge contagion tests US
WASHINGTON — Of the 75 senior positions at the Department of Homeland Security, 20 are either vacant or filled by acting officials, including Chad Wolf, the acting secretary who recently was unable to tell a Senate committee how many respirators and protective face masks were available in the United States.
The National Park Service, which like many federal agencies is full of vacancies in key posts, tried last week to fill the job of a director for the national capital region after hordes of visitors flocked to see the cherry blossoms near the National Mall, creating a potential public health hazard as the coronavirus continues to spread.
At the Department of Veterans Affairs, workers are scrambling to order medical supplies on Amazon after its leaders, lacking experience in disaster responses, failed to prepare for the onslaught of patients at its medical centers.
Ever since President Donald Trump came into office, a record high turnover and unfilled jobs have resulted in empty offices across wide swaths of the federal bureaucracy.
Now, current and former administration officials and disaster experts say the coronavirus has exposed those failings as never before and left parts of the federal government unprepared and ill equipped for what may be the largest public health crisis in a century.
Some 80% of the senior positions in the White
House below the Cabinet level have turned over during Trump’s administration, with about 500 people having departed since the inauguration.
Trump is on his fourth chief of staff, his fourth national security adviser and his fifth secretary of the Department of Homeland Security.
Between Trump’s history of firing people and the choice by many career officials and political appointees to leave, he now finds himself with a government riddled with vacancies, acting department chiefs and, in some cases, leaders whose professional backgrounds do not easily match up to the task of managing a pandemic.
“Right now for the life of me, I don’t know who speaks for DHS,” said Janet Napolitano, a secretary of homeland security under President Barack Obama. “Having nonacting leadership, and I think having consistency in your leadership team and the accumulation of experience, really matters. And I think it would be fair to say the current administration hasn’t sustained that.”
One example is the Department of Veterans Affairs, which is legally meant to back up the nation’s health care system in an emergency. On Thursday, the Office of Inspector General at the department released a report detailing red flags in its preparedness for the crisis.
The secretary, Robert Wilkie, has no experience in emergency management, and he has been largely absent from public briefings with senior officials on the pandemic.
“Secretary Wilkie has attended 20 coronavirus task force meetings since he joined the task force on March 3,” said Christina Mandreucci, a spokeswoman for the department. Wilkie recently fired his second in command, who had worked in past disasters, and his head of emergency preparedness retired.
Senior officials in the department say they are kept out of the loop on major decisions, such as whether it will continue Trump’s preferred policy of sending veterans into the community for care, and learn from the news media about how centers are interpreting guidelines.
Many of the newcomers in agencies lack relationships with the private sector and lawmakers to accomplish basic goals.
One high-profile case came with eliminating a directorate at the White House’s National Security Council that was charged with pandemic preparations. In 2018, John Bolton, then Trump’s national security adviser, ousted Thomas Bossert, Trump’s homeland security adviser and longtime disaster expert. The directorate was folded into an office dedicated to weapons of mass destruction.
Equally notable may have been the resignation last year of Scott Gottlieb, commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, an early advocate for broad coronavirus testing and stronger mitigation policies.
He was succeeded by Dr. Stephen Hahn, a noted oncologist, who has struggled during Senate hearings to explain some of his positions. The agency is largely viewed as slow in engaging the private sector to develop tests for the coronavirus.
As he juggles negotiations on Capitol Hill and introduces emergency lending programs with the Federal Reserve, Steven Mnuchin, the Treasury secretary, is scrambling to have enough officials in place to accommodate the additional workload from four emergency lending programs, two new stimulus bills and a delayed Tax Day.
Perhaps the biggest challenge facing the Treasury Department is the thin staffing at the IRS. The tax collection agency has faced deep cuts to its budget over the last decade, leaving technology out of date.
Now the IRS must cope with Tax Day being delayed by three months and a deluge of questions from taxpayers calling employees that are teleworking. The shortfall in staff is likely to be especially problematic as the Treasury Department tries to send stimulus money to Americans by using the IRS’ taxpayer database to track them down.