"As recently as 2024, the Office of Pandemic Preparedness and Response Policy had 15 employees. In 2026, it has two."
"Just a few months into the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, the public learned something unsettling about Donald Trump and his team: The Obama administration had prepared a document called the “Playbook for Early Response to High-Consequence Emerging Infectious Disease Threats and Biological Incidents” — unofficially known as “the pandemic playbook” — and left it as a guide to follow.
The Republican administration was briefed on the document during Trump’s first year in the White House, but the playbook was, as Politico reported, “thrown onto a shelf” and forgotten about.
In case that weren’t quite enough, Barack Obama’s team also prepared a presentation for the incoming GOP operation during the postelection transition process in early 2017, specifically focused on how the federal government would have to respond in the event of a deadly viral outbreak. This went largely ignored, too.
Trump’s second term offered an opportunity to learn from those mistakes. It doesn’t appear to be going well, however."
