Officials wouldn’t explain why the administration’s coronavirus response was so slow to roll out testing, or to move on promoting social distancing and school closings — all steps highlighted in the exercise, according to the Times.

While President Donald Trump has claimed that “nobody knew there would be a pandemic ... of this proportion,” that’s exactly the kind of possibility the exercise addressed.

The Trump administration also had the benefit of lessons learned by the Obama administration in dealing with the Ebola crisis. Obama aides in early 2017 ran an exercise for pandemic preparedness for incoming officials of the Trump administration as part of the transition, but almost all of the previous administration’s experts had left the government by last year.

Former Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats, who was fired by Trump in 2019, warned of the danger of a pandemic to an unprepared nation last year in his Worldwide Threat Assessment.

The U.S. will “remain vulnerable to the next flu pandemic or large-scale outbreak of a contagious disease that could lead to massive rates of death and disability, severely affect the world economy, strain international resources, and increase calls on the United States for support,” the threat report warned.

The presentation of this year’s threat assessment to members of Congress has been held up by the Trump administration, Time magazine reported, citing unnamed sources. The report warns the U.S. is unprepared for a pandemic.