The Epic Failure of the United States Government

I recently told my son that I don’t want my blog to be solely focused on President Trump. People will surely get tired of the endless controversy that he needlessly brings on himself.

So this particular post is not about the failure of an individual, but the catastrophic failure of the American government itself. The failure of the federal government to protect the lives of its citizens.

We’ve all watched with a feeling of helplessness for years as our political system has sunk deeper and deeper into the cesspool of self-serving partisanship. At times it’s maddening, at other times almost comical. Now it’s become tragically deadly.

What kind of crisis does it take for the federal government to aggressively protect the lives of its citizens?

This morning the Surgeon General, Vice Admiral Jerome Adams said “This is going to be our Pearl Harbor moment, our 9/11 moment, only it's not going to be localized, it's going to be happening all over the country and I want America to understand that.”

Where is the coordinated, proactive response to this crisis?

Yesterday the President said “There's going to be a lot of death, unfortunately. There will be a lot of deaths.”

Good luck states. Hope it all turns out ok.

Kathleen Seblius, former governor of Kansas and said yesterday that “States do not have the purchasing power of the federal government. They do not have the ability to run a deficit like the federal government. They do not have the logistical power of the federal government.”

We are witnessing in real time what happens when partisanship trumps leadership. People die. Thousands of people die.

This week the New England Journal of Medicine posted and editorial by Harvey V. Fineberg, M.D., Ph.D., in which he lays out the way that our government should be responding to this monumental crisis. Read it here: https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMe2007263.

I would love to end by saying that “hopefully we’ll learn from our mistakes.” But this is more than a series of innocent mistakes. This isn’t Monday morning quarterbacking. We’re seeing right now, today, the deadly results when incompetent people lead our government.