Ex-FBI agent: The Coming Corruption Pandemic

During this “unprecedented medical crisis,” be on the lookout for corruption, advises Jeff Cortese at The Hill. “Diseases and outbreaks create an ­opportunity for corruption through the exploitation of fear, suffering and a sense of urgency,” especially for health-care industries — and the consequences can be dangerous: They can not only “reduce dollars that should flow to the people” who need them most but also “diminish the quality of products provided by companies having illicitly won contracts.” Yes, corruption investigations are “difficult,” but it’s vital to ensure “the ethical distribution of funds” and enforce anti-corruption laws “against all bad actors, regardless of their position or status.” That kind of “vigilant posture against corruption,” Cortese contends, is “critical to saving livelihoods and saving lives.”

Eye on Congress: Dems Target the Gig Economy

House Democrats want to “nationalize” California’s war on “gig workers,” warns Mike Watson at The Washington Examiner — and at the worst possible time. The services these workers provide — grocery and restaurant deliveries, in particular — make cabin fever during the lockdowns “tolerable.” They keep restaurants “afloat,” allow the vulnerable to stay inside and offer workers a chance to “make money on the side” to pay bills. Yet these workers’ “independence” is a problem for “Big Labor and its allies in Congress,” because it’s an “alternative” to unions’ “dues-paying cartel model.” Watson warns Democrats now will push, via Congress’ next bailouts, to nationalize California’s rules, which “essentially banned most independent contracting work.” And that will spread “cutbacks by freelance-reliant firms and independent delivery-style services right when businesses and workers need them most.”

Libertarian: Did We Just Nationalize Airlines?

Under the new federal rescue bill, air carriers seeking bailout funds need to fly a minimum number of flights each week. That, worries Reason’s Christian Britschgi, risks “wasting both industry and taxpayer dollars.” More important, it sets the stage for “prolonged government intervention in the passenger airline industry.” The industry is badly hurting right now, running “ ‘ghost flights’ with mostly empty seats and occasionally more flight attendants than passengers.” But the rescue terms, as well as federally backed loans to airlines, might well mean the government will demand “airlines to hand over a large equity stake in their companies.” Combined with the operation diktats, that “starts to look a lot like the ­nationalization of the industry, which could then take years to unwind.”

From the right: The FDA Graveyard

The Food and Drug Administration, led by Commissioner Stephen Hahn, has “long ignored” critics of its “antiquated policies” — but now, observes City Journal’s John Tierney, we see how FDA regs “repeatedly delayed testing for the coronavirus and impeded the manufacture and ­deployment of masks and other protective equipment.” Worse, these “deadly delays” are “an inevitable consequence” of red tape at the FDA, which refused to give “private labs emergency dispensation to provide tests” and “restricted companies” from providing masks, among other things. Instead of letting the FDA “determine what is ‘safe and effective,’ ” let’s “rely on the free market’s vast pool of decentralized knowledge.” Argues Tierney: “Researchers, doctors, hospital administrators, manufacturers, merchants and consumers” can “process and share” more information than Washington bureaucrats can — and do it “a lot more quickly.”

Religion desk: A Lamentation at Easter

Like “churches all over the world,” the “ancient Church of the Holy ­Sepulchre in Jerusalem” has closed its doors for the first time since the Black Plague — and, the Tribune Syndicate’s John Kass laments, the closing couldn’t come at “a worse possible time”: Holy Week for Western Christians and, soon, Easter for Eastern Christians. Yes, we’re isolating “not merely to protect ourselves, but to protect those we don’t even know.” But congregating is critical, too, especially at Easter. After all, a church is “the kind of place that people seek out to be together, not alone, when desperate.” Yet, we can no longer do that — and you can “feel the hearts breaking all over the world.”

— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board