Royce Carroll

With nearly 120,000 deaths and over 2 million cases to date, the US has emerged as one of the hardest-hit countries from the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite having some of the earliest documented cases and highest baseline risks, the US response has generally been seen as weaker and less systematic than other countries, especially among advanced democracies.

Both presidential and federal institutions have shaped the distinct qualities of the US response to COVID-19. The policy environment in 2020 is characterized by “divided government” both horizontally and vertically, each playing a key role in both the public health and economic aspects of the response. The political dynamics have also been shaped by the broader political context, particularly the political polarization among masses and elites. Since his election in 2016, Republican President Donald Trump has positioned his party around his populist image and his personal support falls squarely along the fault lines of political conflict between liberals, Democrats and urban centers, on one hand, and conservatives, Republicans and rural areas on the other.

Within the federal government, the main issue for executive-legislative relations was passing the relief measures designed to mitigate the economic impact of the pandemic and reduce uncertainty about economic recovery.  In the crisis environment of March, this process managed to break through persistent gridlock created by the return of divided government in 2019, when Democrats retook control of the House. This meant that the Democrats were able to have substantial influence in these relief measures. Despite some delays and partisan conflict during the process, both parties in Congress ultimately agreed to a wide-ranging package on economic stimulus, albeit with Democrats voicing concerns about oversight over the spending. As the initial crisis environment has given way to a return to an even more partisan dynamic, especially in the context of the 2020 election, reaching bipartisan agreement on the content of additional stimulus may be much more difficult. 

To the extent the federal government plays a direct role in the response to COVID-19, it has been in the form of executive action for coordination of resources by executive agencies. A hallmark of the Trump administration has been the erosion of technocratic influence in government including a pattern of “cabinet secretaries who were opposed to their departments’ traditional missions” (Pfiffner 2018). After a period of unusually high turnover, a growing proportion of appointees have been those with personal loyalties to the President. Subsequent to some of the very earliest actions related to COVID-19, such as joining the countries adding restrictions on flights from China in late January, the cabinet departments, such as Health and Human Services, seemed to play a less direct role in the COVID-19 response. After making use of emergency declaration powers, which enabled federal funding and coordination efforts, the administration response took a more centralized approach to staffing the executive response. This included a much-criticized task force headed by Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, consisting of private sector actors focused on coordinating supplies during the early days of the outbreaks. The most public efforts of the administration response, however, came mainly via the White House Coronavirus Task Force headed by Vice President Mike Pence.  

The Task Force was composed of heads of executive offices, agencies, and institutes connected to public health from throughout the executive branch, most of whom were political appointees from within the Trump administration. However, a notable exception was member Dr. Anthony Fauci, Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases dating back to the Reagan Administration. During the initial weeks of the US outbreak, Fauci served as the face of the administration’s COVID-19 response, reportedly for his perceived credibility among the public and medical community. This also led to tension between Fauci’s more technocratic public health approach and Trump’s efforts to push for a more rapid end to aggressive COVID-19 mitigation measures. As a result, Fauci was a frequent target of criticism from conservative media, often as part of a broader suspicion of the Federal bureaucracy. More recently, the Trump administration has reduced the profile of the Task Force.

While the President has perhaps been the most visible actor, the US federal system leaves the most direct role in handling public health policy to the state governments. This has meant great variation in the types of responses to the COVID-19 crisis. Control of state governments varies widely, with all institutions of government controlled by one party in most states. Of the 50 state governments, 21 are fully Republican-controlled and 15 are fully Democrat-controlled. Of the 14 cases of divided government at the state level, 10 of these have Democratic governors.

With densely populated cities having become more consistently supportive of Democrats and states with such cities generally having Democratic governors as of 2019, partisan divides have been particularly important in the context of COVID-19. One reason is that the effect of international transit and population density in the early spread of the virus meant that “blue states” (states that have voted more for the Democratic Party, and recently against Trump) contained the cities with the largest initial outbreaks, especially New York. This also meant these states were in the position of requesting the earliest assistance from the federal government in a coordination effort that was criticized as exhibiting partisan influence.

Regarding the state-level responses themselves, the general dynamic has been that Democratic politicians have been more inclined to support more aggressive responses to COVID-19 similar to those employed in Europe, while Republican politicians have tended to be more skeptical of the threat and resistant to restrictive measures. The result is that states with Democratic control, or at least Democratic governors, were more in line with common response measures taken internationally, while states with Republican control have tended to be more focused on limiting the economic impact of measures, with later, looser and/or shorter periods of restrictions on movement and business. The result is a highly varied set of policies in place across the nation. Making matters more complex, variation exists in municipal and county-level responses, especially in states with looser state-level restrictions. The result is a patchwork of responses to the crisis that reflects political dynamics.

Public opinion about the importance of the COVID-19 crisis has also been political, with Republican voters initially less concerned about the threat of the virus in general (see Barrios and Hochberg 2020 for an overview). Partially as a result, there has been a strong correlation across states between the party leanings of the population, on the one hand, and social distancing and use of non-essential business on the other. Trump himself has reinforced the partisan divide on the issue by publicly favoring lifting business restrictions and stay-at-home orders, initially as early as mid-April, and voicing sympathy for public protests against the measures put in place by Democratic governors. In this context, Republican governors in states where Trump has strong support would likely face a backlash were they to appear to diverge from Trump’s apparent position on these issues. Accordingly, the main exceptions to the partisan divide have come from the states where Republicans govern states where the electorate generally opposed Trump in 2016, such as in Maryland and Massachusetts.

Over the last two months, states have moved at differing rates of speed to lift restrictions. In some cases this has been done after states with severe early peaks were brought down considerably. Most of the states that lifted restrictions earliest, however, are those that had far fewer early cases and were resistant to employing aggressive measures. The shift in discussion at the state level to post-lockdown measures, such as requirements for masks, has also echoed the earlier partisan divisions on stay-at-home orders and business restrictions.  Meanwhile, many of the states that escaped the early waves of infection are now seeing new growth in COVID-19 cases. 

The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the longstanding concerns about the ability of the presidential and federal structures of the US constitution to operate in a context of partisan polarization. The formal decentralization of US political institutions already limits a nationally coordinated strategy compared to other countries. But the incorporation of issues surrounding the response into the bipolar political divide has further undermined a consensus approach on balancing economic concerns and public safety. The populist, anti-establishment sentiment of the Trump era has deepened this long-standing divide, exacerbating political barriers to coordination between policy-makers and public health experts..

References

Barrios, J.M. and Hochberg, Y., 2020. Risk perception through the lens of politics in the time of the COVID-19 pandemic (No. w27008). National Bureau of Economic Research.

Pfiffner, J.P., 2018. The contemporary presidency: Organizing the Trump presidency. Presidential Studies Quarterly, 48(1), pp.153-167.