When we started hearing that the Trump administration sowed the seeds for the lackluster response to this outbreak by firing the nation’s whole pandemic preparedness team a few years ago, it was genuinely disturbing how unsurprising it was.

But former administration officials are now pushing back against the report that Trump recklessly fired the response team of experts by claiming… he didn’t dissolve the team at all. An odd flex given that Donald Trump already admitted that he fired everyone in the office, explaining that he didn’t want people on the payroll when there wasn’t an active threat and “when we need them, we can get them back very quickly.”

And while being comically contradicted by Trump himself should end the inquiry, the managerial lackeys who actually staked their careers on this debacle are taking to the press to try and defend their crumbling professional reputations.

Tim Morrison, a former NSC official, wrote to the Washington Post claiming, “No, the White House didn’t ‘dissolve’ its pandemic response office. I was there.” It’s an editorial earning a lot of plaudits from John Bolton, Morrison’s former boss. who is also deeply implicated in this move since he oversaw the decision. Right-wing Twitter is sending it around in… I don’t know… some kind of weird attempt to claim that whatever Trump did with the team isn’t why the response has been so badly botched?

It’s also an editorial that seems to woefully misunderstand both “pandemics” and “preparedness.”

Morrison’s claim is that he ran the successor organization to the pandemic preparedness group, a move that cut most of the minds behind the original, but…

One such move at the NSC was to create the counterproliferation and biodefense directorate, which was the result of consolidating three directorates into one, given the obvious overlap between arms control and nonproliferation, weapons of mass destruction terrorism, and global health and biodefense. It is this reorganization that critics have misconstrued or intentionally misrepresented. If anything, the combined directorate was stronger because related expertise could be commingled.

This is where we can all take a lesson from Ford v. Ferrari.

When you take a highly specialized racing unit and say, “we’re making changes, firing your people, and putting you under the domestic sedan unit,” well, you end up losing Le Mans.

Morrison and Bolton are publicly arguing that they aren’t responsible for dismantling a highly praised pandemic team because they buried its mission under the auspices of an arms control and bioterror unit. Except those are security threats predicated upon predicting and remediating human state and non-state actors. Where, exactly, does a group born out of influenza responses fit? Because when your leadership is a bioterrorism hammer, everything becomes a nail. This is how you end up with 800 scenarios for a nerve gas attack on public transit and 0 scenarios for dealing with an asymptomatic pneumoniatic flu.

Like the revolving door corporate hacks that they are, the administration made its cuts about “efficiency” rather than “results” and somehow has the gall to pretend they were right when the whole operation crashes around them. Diseases might come from bioterrorism, but they’re far more likely to come from the serendipity of mutation. If some entity were planning a bioterror attack, it would focus on agents that are highly lethal and, necessarily, not highly contagious — diseases can’t survive when they kill the host. This is precisely why an organization charged with gameplanning terrorist attacks is ill-suited to deal with traditional pandemics. The whole frame of reference is wrong.

Dissolving the team would have been bad, but what the administration actually did was far worse. What they actually did was slit the throat of America’s preparedness for an outbreak like this while convincing themselves they still had a plan. Senior administration officials honestly believed they had this covered by their cut-rate bioterror team. The whole operation revolves around the idea that there’s someone to attack, someone to blame, someone to fire. But there’s no villain here and they can’t seem to grasp what to do about that.

If only they had some sort of “team” charged with “preparing” for something like this…

No, the White House didn’t ‘dissolve’ its pandemic response office. I was there. [Washington Post]

Trump disbanded NSC pandemic unit that experts had praised [AP]

Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.