THREAD: This weekend, the Surgeon General said we're entering dark days with COVID-19. "It's going to be our Pearl Harbor moment, our 9/11 moment.... It's going to be happening all over the country." Yet, we are facing this crisis with critical vacancies across our government....
2) The top jobs in both lack Senate-confirmed appointees. At DHS, there's no Secretary or Deputy Secretary. The DHS Secretary job will have been vacant for a *year* as of Friday. At ODNI, there's no Dir of National Intelligence, nor Principal Dep Dir, nor head of the @NCTCGov.
3) At @ODNIgov, Trump has been without a confirmed Dir of National Intelligence since since last summer, and is on his second "acting." He forced out too two different principal deputies, in order to install, most recently, @RichardGrenell. This was exactly as COVID-19 spread.
4) At @DHSGov, there's no Under Sec for Management, no CFO, no Executive Secretary, no CIO, no General Counsel, no Under Sec for Science & Tech, nor Dep Under Sec for Science & Tech.
6) Both of the deputy roles at @FEMA, the agency now overseeing the federal COVID-19 response, are vacant. And the person who oversees DHS's chief medical officer, the Asst Sec for Countering WMD? That job is vacant too.
7) At the White House itself, Trump has downgraded and effectively gotten rid of the White House Homeland Security Advisor, another role created after 9/11 to help prevent such crises—and lead the response to, say, a pandemic.
8) Yes, we're facing a crisis like Pearl Harbor or 9/11. Both crises unfolded, in part, because of intelligence and policy failures. We tried to fix those problems afterward, building whole new structures after 9/11. Trump discarded them, downgraded them, left them empty.
9) Remember as we go through this, we didn't have to face this as we are. We could have been better prepared. We could have had a better sense it was coming. We could have responded faster, harder, stronger.
10) Instead, we've been caught flat-footed. The saddest bit to me of my reporting of my @WIRED oral history last week on being at New York's epicenter was the ER doc who referred wistfully to "China-grade" PPE.... wired.com/story/new-york…
11) "I don’t know anyone has that right now," he said. Think about that. There's no hospital in the US operating right now with "China-grade" protective equipment for our health care workers. In the United States. In 2020. That failure is Donald Trump's failure.
12) This thread also doesn't account for the other key vacancies across government. Like, for instance, there's still no Navy Secretary—the job, you know, responsible for overseeing the COVID-19-infected aircraft carrier.... nytimes.com/2020/04/05/mag…
PS: so when you see this type of insulting answer to a genuine crisis—know that this is the result of years of Trump’s day-to-day mismanagement of the sacred trust of an effective US government.
PPS: New numbers about @DHSgov’s own challenges with COVID-19. And yet it faces this crisis amid all manner of vacancies and empty offices.
And here’s a look just at Treasury, which is also short-staffed amid an unprecedented economic calamity:
