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Where things stand
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President Trump said on Tuesday that the White House would soon dissolve its coronavirus task force, which has been the administration’s main source of expert advice on the pandemic and the central planning body for its response. “We will have something in a different form,” Trump said as he toured a Honeywell mask manufacturing plant in Arizona. Already, the president has stopped tying his daily news conferences to the task force’s meetings, and he is no longer flanked by members of the group at most briefings. As we noted in yesterday’s newsletter, federal experts have projected a huge surge in coronavirus cases by the end of the month, even as Trump has publicly projected confidence and pressured states to reopen. With his comments on Tuesday that the administration is moving into a new “phase” of the response, it is not yet clear what role science and empirical data will play going forward.
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Rick Bright, a federal scientist who had been leading the administration’s search for a virus vaccine, made headlines last month when he said he had been demoted after resisting pressure to route resources toward the anti-malaria drug hydroxychloroquine. In a formal whistle-blower complaint filed on Tuesday, Bright said he had also been pressured to steer millions of dollars in contracts to the clients of a drug company executive who is close to Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser. In the 89-page complaint, Bright also said that Alex Azar, the health and human services secretary, and other officials in his agency had resisted requests for resources to develop drugs and vaccines against the pandemic as early as January.
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If Trump has his way, a lawyer who served on his impeachment defense team will soon become the new inspector general in charge of overseeing much of the federal funding for virus relief. The lawyer, Brian Miller, delivered prepared testimony to the Senate on Tuesday saying that if confirmed, he would “conduct every audit and investigation with fairness and impartiality.” Trump recently ousted several inspectors general responsible for overseeing elements of the administration’s virus response. One of them was Glenn Fine, who was about to become the watchdog of the Pandemic Response Accountability Committee, the position that Miller — who had previously served as the lead inspector at the General Services Administration — is now nominated to fill. He would oversee the use of money allocated by Congress in March as part of its major coronavirus relief bill, including $500 billion supporting the Federal Reserve’s emergency lending program, as well as loans and grants to airlines and other companies.
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Many colleges and universities may be unable to reopen in the fall because of the continuing threat of the virus, which would cause a huge loss in tuition revenues. At the same time, state budgets, which help fund public educational institutions, are staring down a possible 20 percent decline in receipts next fiscal year, according to Moody’s Analytics. So what gives? According to Kevin Carey, the head of the education policy program at the think tank New America and a contributor to The Upshot, considering recent historical trends, it appears possible that public college and university budgets could be slashed, causing both tuition and student loan debt to skyrocket. After all, that’s what happened across the country after the Great Recession. Were this to happen again now, Carey writes, it’s possible that so-called public higher education would be out of reach for most of the country.
Photo of the day
President Trump touring the mask production plant in Phoenix on Tuesday.
Poll finds approval of Trump’s virus response slipping — but Republicans are increasingly ready for reopening.
Approval of Trump’s handling of the coronavirus continues to slip, but an increasingly sizable share of Republicans now say that if anything, the government response hasn’t been too lax — it’s been overboard. These are among the findings of a Monmouth University poll released on Tuesday.
In the survey, 42 percent of Americans said they approved of Trump’s handling of the pandemic — a four-percentage-point slide from April, and eight points down from March.
Asked about the information Trump has provided to the public about the virus, just one in three Americans said they found it helpful; 42 percent described it as harmful. Most Americans (55 percent) said his public statements about the outbreak had been largely inconsistent.
In the poll, 54 percent said that the federal government had not done enough to help states hit hard by the virus, roughly on par with the results from last month. By more than two to one, Americans were more likely to worry that states would lift restrictions too quickly, rather than too slowly.
But among Republicans, there are signs of a shift.
A slight majority of G.O.P. respondents said they were more worried about things reopening too slowly, rather than too quickly. And while Democrats were more likely to say that the federal government’s efforts to contain the virus had not gone far enough, Republicans were far more likely to say the federal response had been appropriate.
And now, for the first time, just as many Republicans (17 percent) said the federal government had in fact gone too far in its efforts to slow the virus’s spread as said it hadn’t done enough (16 percent). A month ago, Republicans were likelier to say the federal government had done too little.
Similarly, while a majority of Americans across party lines expressed support for their state governments’ response to the virus, an increasingly sizable share of Republicans now view their state governments as having overstepped, reflecting the potency of a protest movement demanding an end to government-mandated social distancing.
In the most recent Monmouth poll, 30 percent of Republicans said their state governments' virus response had gone too far. That’s a big jump from the 11 percent of Republicans who said so last month.
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