In a recent Op-ed with The Hill, former Secretary of Homeland Security and TCG Honorary Advisory Board member, Jeh Johnson offers his insight on the current government response to the coronavirus and urges officials to start taking concrete action to slow the spread of the virus.
“ Many reporters have asked me in recent days to critique the Trump administration’s response to the COVID-19 crisis. To try now to assess the administration’s response to this ongoing crisis is like trying to assess the government’s preparedness and response to 9/11 on 9/12, while first responders were still pulling the dead from the smoldering wreckage of the World Trade Center.
In the months and years ahead, scores of congressional committees, agency inspectors general and scholars will study the Trump administration’s actions in response to this crisis and why it did not take action sooner. This type of after-action second-guessing is one of the things that official Washington does best (if I sound a bit cynical here, I admit it’s from being the object of the same thing), and hopefully there will be things we learn from it.
But until a vaccine and a treatment for COVID-19 are found, we must urgently address the here and now, and devote our minds and energy to slowing the spread of the virus. Here are a few observations:
First, there is widespread misapprehension about the roles and authorities of federal, state and local governments to address the crisis. The federal government does not have the general legal authority to command people to shelter in place or stay away from public spaces and events. At most, the federal government has the authority to regulate our international borders, to limit the interstate travel of those with communicable diseases, and some limited, rarely invoked authority to quarantine people with a communicable disease who somehow present a threat to interstate travel. The authority to direct people to stay at home or stay away from their workplace is a public health and police power typically reserved to state and local governments. “
Read Jeh’s full op-ed here
