It’s Time to Listen to the Doomsday Planners
For a moment earlier this month, the West Wing seemed like a vector of disease. First came the news that Donald Trump’s personal valet had tested positive for the coronavirus. Then the vice president’s spokeswoman, who is married to another senior White House staffer, fell ill with COVID-19. Through it all, the president downplayed the risk of his exposure, openly flouting his top health agencies’ social-distancing guidelines. Trump is fine, but these brushes with the virus raise the question: What’s the plan if the whole White House becomes infected?
The answer typically lies with the government’s so-called doomsday planners—the officials at every major agency who are tasked with preparing and rehearsing the nation’s classified continuity-of-government plans. For decades, doomsday planners’ presence has been tolerated, their recommendations have been stashed in policy documents, and their warnings about dark tidings have been for the most part unheeded. The Trump administration has taken an actively hostile approach, though, decimating the institutional engines of catastrophe planning, including at the National Security Council. As a consequence, the U.S. government was not only ill-prepared for the pandemic, but willfully blinded to its potential size and shape, leaving federal agencies in the position of having to confront a fast-moving hurricane without radar to determine where it was headed or a plan to quickly restore essential functions.
The coronavirus has pushed the country’s national-security bureaucracy to figure out how to adapt in a severely restricted work environment, and forced a reexamination of how the government prepares for crises. COVID-19 hasn’t brought the United States to the precipice of doomsday, per se, but it has exposed how much citizens and states rely on a functioning federal government. It’s also revealed the consequences of whose jobs require them to churn through permutations and contingencies. Government agencies as crucial as the CIA have had to develop COVID-19 response plans on the fly. Telework practices are patchy and decided by each agency. And it is unclear, even to employees at the highest levels of the national-security bureaucracy, what they ought to be doing.
