Hurrah for the end of White House buck-passing

During a call with journalists on Friday, National Economic Council Director-designate Brian Deese made a subtle but nonetheless significant commitment: that once Joe Biden is president, the federal government will stop passing the buck to the states.

He was talking about vaccine distribution — providing clearer federal guidance for who gets the coronavirus vaccine, greater logistical support, etc. — but let’s hope it becomes a broader theme of the Biden presidency.

The outgoing administration’s approach, Deese said, “has essentially been to leave everything to the states and not take any action to try to address those issues of clarity or otherwise.”

“A lot of the failures are derivative of that,” he added — which is undoubtedly correct.

President “I Alone Can Fix It” Trump has, perversely, absolved himself of responsibility for anything. He explicitly said last March that “I don’t take responsibility at all” for flaws in the coronavirus response, including persistent testing shortages. Likewise, at a March meeting with business leaders pleading for federal leadership as states bid against one another for supplies, Trump’s son-in-law and adviser Jared Kushner reportedly said: “That’s their problem.”

Fast-forward to Trump tweet, “The Federal Government has distributed the vaccines to the states. Now it is up to the states to administer. Get moving!”

Even before the coronavirus hit, the Trump administration (aided by congressional Republicans) had been trying to dump intractable health-care problems onto states that were illequipped to solve them alone.

Relying upon states to serve as the “laboratories of democracy” has its upsides, of course. During normal (non-crisis) times, states can experiment with different ways to deliver services, tax, regulate, train workers or whatever else. Researchers and policymakers study what succeeds and what doesn’t.

But there’s a degree of fantasy involved in thinking that states are equipped to figure out how to respond to a sudden, logistically complex pandemic without much federal guidance. Especially if this lack of coordination results in states simply competing against each other for scarce supplies (and bidding up their prices), rather than finding ways to create more of those supplies — or issuing contradictory safety guidelines.

Consider Florida’s vaccine rollout. When the feds declined to provide sufficient clarity for distribution, Florida chose not to fill the leadership vacuum. No one was in charge. The state essentially left decisions up to hospitals, which led to chaos and confusion and seniors sleeping in their cars outside public health centers to queue for shots.

Another serious flaw of our federalist system exposed by the pandemic is our fragmented safety net. There are more than 50 separate unemployment insurance systems — each designed, commissioned and maintained by a different state, district or territory. The main thing most have in common is their awfulness. By which I mean, they’re generally arbitrary, confusing, painful to access and expensive for states to maintain.

It will be comforting to have a presidential administration that not only sees the possible advantages of centralizing leadership but is willing to take on the hard work (and risks) of providing it. During Friday’s call, Deese concluded by saying that “ultimately, states and localities have a huge role to play in this. But federal government needs to be providing clear, consistent and more guidance, more logistical support and more resources.” In many ways, that’s a pretty banal statement. But in the context of the past four years, it’s practically revolutionary.