In the coming week, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is expected to reveal another coronavirus relief bill, likely the last of its kind before November’s election. With cases in the U.S. skyrocketing and death tolls surging, it comes at an urgent moment. In its current form, the Republican-sponsored bill allocates $25 billion to testing and contact tracing—measures seen as crucial to tamping down on the virus’s spread in the states. But according to the Washington Post, the White House has objected to the funding, with some administration officials advocating to cut it from the bill altogether before it makes it to the Senate floor. This has led to tensions with Republicans, some of whom are reportedly “angered” and “trying to push back and ensure that the money stays in the bill.”
The administration is also obstructing billions for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention—which Donald Trump has repeatedly blamed for his own inadequate response—as well as the Pentagon and State Department. And as the Post notes, the conflict between Trump officials and GOP senators comes “even before bipartisan negotiations get under way” over issues like unemployment insurance. If Congress doesn’t decide to extend them, enhanced unemployment benefits will expire for millions of Americans in less than two weeks. Instead, the administration sees the spending package as an opportunity to fund endeavors seemingly unrelated to the public health crisis at hand, such as a new FBI building, apparently a “longtime priority” for the president.
Likely coloring the White House’s stance is the attitude among its core response team that the coronavirus crisis is on the downturn, even as more than 76,000 new cases were reported Friday, compared to fewer than 20,000 in late May, per the Post. Trump’s White House is full of people willing to indulge the president with sunny predictions for virus recovery, an illusion that seems to have lulled him into a false sense of security. A New York Times report on Friday revealed that Dr. Deborah Birx, the chief medical officer on the White House coronavirus task force, has played a central role in touting this optimism, with the story describing her as “a constant source of upbeat news for the president and his aides, walking the halls with charts emphasizing that outbreaks were gradually easing.” Birx reportedly relied heavily on models even when their authors, such as those behind the University of Washington’s predictions, warned about their accuracy, noting the predictions to be contingent on “key assumptions,” such as maintaining social distancing measures until June 1.
Still, the White House continued to find reassurance in the data. According to the director of the University’s modeling program, it wasn’t until around April 22 “when the tone shifted. They started to ask questions about what will be the trajectory and where with the lifting of mandates?” The Times noted that the White House never fully re-assessed plans about the course of the pandemic made around this time, coming around to the reality of the situation only in June. “It was all predicated on reduction, open, reduction, open more, reduction, open,” said Miami Mayor Francis Suarez of the White House’s approach to reopening businesses. “There was never what happens if there is an increase after you reopen?”
Nor does there appear to be a directive from the top to re-run the numbers. Per the Times, “even now”—in mid-July—“there are internal divisions over how far to go in having officials publicly acknowledge the reality of the situation.” In an interview with Fox News’s Chris Wallace on Sunday, Trump embodied that attitude. When Wallace confronted Trump with his statement in early July that “at some point, [the coronavirus is] going to sort of just disappear. I hope,” Trump replied, “I’ll be right eventually. I will be right eventually. You know, I said: ‘It’s going to disappear.’ I’ll say it again…It’s going to disappear and I’ll be right.”
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