At the New York Times, Zachary Carter says the coronavirus killed the gospel of small government. I doubt this is true; one suspects the true believers will take their dream of drowning government in a bathtub to their graves. But what Carter writes is still very much worth reading. Among other things, Carter writes that the U.S. response to the pandemic was hampered by decades of neglecting the nation’s problems.

Doctors and nurses were left without basic protective equipment because the United States lacked the manufacturing capacity to produce it. Efforts to track and contain the virus were delayed by bottlenecks in test production and shortages of supplementary equipment like swabs. Once tests could be administered, a nationwide scarcity of test-processing equipment prolonged the delivery of test results.

The reason: More than a decade into a hospital-closure crisis, the United States faced a shortage of beds and medical facilities necessary to manage an emergency. Hospitals overrun with Covid-19 patients turned away ambulances. Vaccine distribution, while steadily improving, has been hampered by shortages of both staffing and supplies. The poverty of local government infrastructure has disgraced the rollout further. Websites crash, phone lines are busy, parking lots are full.

These are not only public health failures but also economic failures — an inability to marshal resources to solve a problem. And the often-toxic incompetence of American political leadership has obscured the structural causes of this failure.

See also The Dead End of Small Government.

Once upon a time the U.S. regularly made robust investments in infrastructure, space flight, scientific research, education, etc. The amount of such investment as a percentage of GDP plummeted in 1980, Carter wrote. Good old Reaganomics. Tax cuts were more important. As a result, when the pandemic came and we needed secure infrastructure and supply lines and something at least resembling a public health system, we were in trouble. Various commissions over the years had warned that we were unprepared to deal with various sorts of crises for various reasons, but these concerns were not addressed by our government. “And the past year has exposed its impoverished thinking: The trouble was not spending too much ahead of the crisis, but spending too little — on research, infrastructure and manufacturing capacity,” Carter writes.

So we went into the pandemic with a lot of handicaps. The biggest handicap was Donald Trump. I am sure many books will be written about all the ways Trump’s so-called response to the pandemic was unacceptable, but for now I want to focus on vaccines.

Trump and his supporters want you to know that we have vaccines because of his stability and genius, or something. There’s a lot of confusion about exactly what the Trump Administration did and did not do, so let’s look at that.

Trump’s “Operation Warp Speed” provided grants to pay for research and development of vaccines. Moderna, Johnson & Johnson, and some other companies took the grants, but Pfizer did not. Since Pfizer’s was the first vaccine to be approved for emergency use, one wonders if the grants really speeded up the development part. However, Warp Speed also paid to have vaccines manufactured in advance of approval so that they would be immediately available if approved. Waiting for approval to begin manufacturing would have added a few months to the wait time, I understajd. So, credit where credit is due; vaccines were available more quickly than they would have been otherwise.

However, the pre-orders were relatively small. For example, the pre-order to Pfizer was for 100 million doses, or enough to vaccinate 50 million people. The European Union pre-ordered twice that. And then in late December, in response to criticism of the scarcity of the vaccines, the Trumpers released all of the inventory. When Joe Biden took office, the stockpile was depleted.

The Trump effort completely fell apart in the distribution phase. The Trump distribution plan was, mostly, let the states figure it out. See No, Trump Doesn’t Deserve Credit For Planning Vaccine Distribution by Kate Riga and Josh Kovensky at Talking Points Memo.

A look at what actually happened in the Trump administration’s last months shows that the White House lacked a plan for the “last mile” of distribution, leaving that to the states while lobbying Congress not to pass much-needed funding that would spur state and local governments to get the vaccine into arms. …

…What the Trump administration left the country with was a partnership with pharmacies to vaccinate nursing homes — the only real footprint of a federal plan to deliver vaccine into people’s arms. And even that foundered amid allegations of inefficiency compared to states that opted out.

What’s more is that that one plan only covered the first phase of distribution: nursing home residents and hospital workers, who received inoculations from the medical facilities at which they worked. It set the Biden administration up for a “vaccine cliff,” an outcome that was avoided in part due to the outcry over the sheer ineptitude of the effort’s early stages.

Josh Marshall explained this more succinctly:

 The administration had a system and funding for getting assisted living facilities vaccinated and I believe also health care workers vaccinated. But that program and funding was designed to run out at the beginning of February. And that was it. So it seemed almost intentionally designed to get everyone pumped up about getting vaccinated and then have all the plans and money run out about one week after Biden’s inauguration. So a pre-planned train-wreck on Biden’s watch.

Beyond that, there was no plan other than to dump the vaccines onto the states. The Trumpers couldn’t even manage to communicate to states what to expect and when, making the two-vaccine protocol a tad difficult to coordinate.

Josh Marshall also has a long post about why the Trump response was so screwed up, which unfortunately is behind a subscription wall. Basically, he says that the early phase of Warp Speed, sending money to pharmaceutical companies, was the simple part. The federal government has a lot of money. It got sent to pharmaceutical companies. Not that hard. But the vaccine distribution part is extraordinarily complex, and it’s obvious the Trumpers just couldn’t do it. They lacked experience and expertise and, worse, had no respect for those who did have experience and expertise. They were too stupid and incompetent to realize how in over their heads they were.

And Trump himself is nothing if not risk-averse. His pattern throughout his time in the White House was to refuse to deal with difficult problems and then blame whoever did take on the problem for screwing it up.

From the very start of the Pandemic in the first weeks of 2020 the Trump administration consistently sought to disclaim responsibility for things that would be genuinely difficult and could have challenging or bad outcomes. Push the tough tasks on to others and if it goes badly blame them. This frequently went to absurd lengths as when the White House insisted that states short on ventilators at the peak of the spring surge should have known to purchase them in advance of the pandemic. Over the course of the year Trump spun up an alternative reality in which the US was somehow still operating under the Articles of Confederation in which individual states were responsible for things that have been viewed as inherently federal responsibilities for decades or centuries.

But in a lot of ways Trump wasn’t that much of an outlier. Ever since the rise of Reagan and of “movement conservatism,” the pattern has been to cut taxes, cut spending, trust the “free market” to solve problems, listen to ideological crackpots instead of experts, and when things get screwed up, blame liberals. And here we are.

Just about exactly one year ago, when we were just beginning to face the pandemic, Jamelle Bouie at the New York Times wrote a column headlined “The Era of Small Government Is Over.” He understood what we were about to go through. Unfortunately, the column should have been headlines “The Era of Small Government Should End Now, But It Probably Won’t.” Because it didn’t. And there are plenty of people in government who embrace their “small government” fantasies even now.

But maybe the influence of “small government” ideology will shrink enough that we can drown it in a bathrub. Then something good will have come out of this awful pandemic.