The White House is expected to request emergency funding from Congress this week to support its response to the coronavirus, as critics take aim at the administration’s characteristic disorganization in dealing with the crisis and how past budget cuts may have left the country less prepared to tackle it. The amount the administration will seek is not yet clear, but according to Politico, it could be as little as $1 billion—far less than experts say is necessary to fight what the World Health Organization warned is not yet, but could become, a pandemic.

“It is time to do everything you would do to prepare for a pandemic,” Mike Ryan, head of the WHO’s health emergencies program, said Monday. Donald Trump, not exactly known for his crisis management skills, has of course declared his administration well-equipped to handle the situation. “We have it under control,” the president said Sunday as he left for a trip to India, suggesting that the United States has “pretty much closed our doors in certain areas” to keep out those potentially infected and that just a “very small amount” of “well-confined” Americans have contracted the illness. “They should be getting better fairly soon,” Trump said. “Very interestingly, we have no deaths.”

But as the virus spreads across the globe, with outbreaks in South Korea, Italy, and Iran, the WHO is cautioning that the world could be caught flat-footed in the face of a mounting crisis. In the U.S., those concerns have been exacerbated by the Trump administration, which had been reluctant to request additional money from Congress to deal with the deadly disease, despite Democratic demands they do so. White House officials expressed hopes that the “virus would burn itself out by the summer,” according to Politico, speculation that it is more concerned about the image it is projecting than preventing an outbreak at home. “They don’t want to make it a bigger thing,” one senior Democratic aide told the outlet recently.

Even if Congress provides additional funding, there remain fears that the Trump administration has already hamstrung it’s ability to address this emergency. As Foreign Policy’s Laurie Garrett wrote last month, the administration has “intentionally rendered itself incapable” of dealing with a problem of this scale. It wiped out its “entire pandemic response chain of command, including the White House management infrastructure,” Garrett wrote, and shut down the National Security Council’s global health security team, as well as its counterpart in the Department of Homeland Security. In addition to proposing funding cuts for national and global health programs, the administration has also kneecapped its public health teams by declining to replace officials who have left. While the president established a Coronavirus Task Force led by Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar last month, “it’s not clear how it will function,” Garrett noted—essentially forcing the administration to “[resort] to improvisation” in its approach to the crisis.

While the U.S. has been fortunate so far to not see an outbreak like those experienced in China and Japan, the administration has appeared disjointed at times in its handling of the crisis. The State Department’s decision to allow 14 American passengers who had been quarantined on the Diamond Princess cruise ship to return to the U.S. took Trump, a notorious germaphobe, by surprise, the New York Times reported over the weekend, and he expressed his fury to Azar. GOP officials in Alabama were similarly taken aback when the Trump administration notified the state it would be sending some coronavirus patients there; after objecting to the proposal, the administration backed off the plan. “[Trump] called to assure me that this plan will not move forward,” Republican Governor Kay Ivey tweeted Sunday. What’s been lacking in the federal government’s response, Democratic Sen. Brian Schatz said on MSNBC, “is coordination and effort." There’s been confusion, he said, as different agencies, at times, have provided conflicting information. “To the extent that we’ve been fortunate with this disease, it’s because of the epidemiology of the disease,” he said, “not because of some sort of coordinated response from the federal government.”

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