vox--2020-03-17--What the military can and can’t do in a coronavirus response

Share All sharing options for : What the military can and can ’ t do in a coronavirus response With civilian hospitals increasingly overwhelmed and the coronavirus outbreak in America deepening , defense and medical experts say there ’ s one way to help : Put the military to work .
For over a century , America ’ s armed forces have dealt with medical crises across the globe .
Many service members today have the expertise to assist with medical care ; build field hospitals ; provide shelter ; or transport food , medical equipment , and people to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ That ’ s already happening in Georgia and Florida and New York , for example , where those states ’ National Guards were called to help combat Covid-19 , the disease caused by the coronavirus .
“ The Department of Defense provides the ability to scale up like no other part of the US government can , ” Andrew Weber , the Pentagon ’ s top biological defense official from 2011 to 2014 , told me .
“ Whatever is needed to mount an appropriate response , the military can do it at @ @ @ @ @ @ @ note that America ’ s troops wouldn ’ t be leading efforts to combat Covid-19 .
They ’ d be supporting civilian leaders from the Federal Emergency Management Agency ( FEMA ) or the Department of Health and Human Services ( HHS ) with extra people , expertise , and technology .
That ’ s likely why , during the Democratic presidential debate on Sunday night , former Vice President Joe Biden called for the military to be deployed across America .
“ It ’ s a national emergency , and I would @ @ @ @ @ @ @ said .
“ We ’ re at war with the virus.
” But the military ’ s involvement isn ’ t a panacea , and it has strict limitations on what it can do .
Laws prohibit most troops from performing law enforcement functions , for example , and its actions are curtailed to helping states with things like emergency medical treatment and evacuations .
What ’ s more , the military only has a few small hospitals in the United States that are set up to treat military medical problems , top @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Those facilities aren ’ t particularly ready to deal with the coronavirus outbreak or provide what civilian hospitals might need .
It ’ s also unclear how many ventilators the Pentagon would be able to add to the nearly 13,000 in America ’ s stockpile , which are important to help those sick with the virus breathe .
In other words , the military can help , but it can ’ t solve the government ’ s response problems .
It also doesn ’ t help that the Army alone , for instance @ @ @ @ @ @ @ respond to the outbreak .
“ We ’ re trying to be very careful about not overpromising , ” Air Force Brig .
Gen. Paul Friedrichs , the Joint Staff surgeon , told reporters on Monday .
As of now , there ’ s no indication President Donald Trump wants to use the military .
Most jarring is that he doesn ’ t have a senior Pentagon official on his Coronavirus Task Force .
( It ’ s possible the military doesn ’ t want to be involved — more on that later @ @ @ @ @ @ @ as easy a call for Trump to make as some might think , but the dozen current and former defense officials and medical experts I spoke with say he should still use his authority to put the military to work now .
“ There ’ s just so much capacity in the Defense Department that ’ s completely untapped at the moment , and that ’ s a mistake , ” Kelly Magsamen , a former top Pentagon official in the Obama administration , told me .
The legality of using the US @ @ @ @ @ @ @ into what the military could do to help with the coronavirus , it ’ s first important to know what it ’ s allowed to do at the president ’ s request .
The US military is barred from using its capabilities directly to enforce US domestic laws unless Congress specifically authorizes it to do so .
This stipulation , known as “ posse comitatus , ” is why US troops can only support civilian agencies like FEMA but not take direct action themselves .
Per FEMA ’ s own website , the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , conducting searches and seizures , making arrests or apprehensions , surveillance , investigation , or undercover work.
” There ’ s no indication that long-standing statute is going to change anytime soon .
However , this rule doesn ’ t apply to the National Guard and the Coast Guard — which means both services could perform law enforcement functions if asked by a state ’ s governor .
That means they could conceivably block roads or keep people from visiting family and friends , though that would be a severe response and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to authorize that yet .
The president , or at least his lawyers , knows all this .
On Friday , Trump issued two declarations to deal with the outbreak : one reliant on the Stafford Act , and one based on the National Emergencies Act .
As my colleague Ian Millhiser wrote , “ Title IV of the Stafford Act permits the president to declare that a particular crisis is a ‘ major disaster , ’ and such a declaration does provide the president with new powers that he may use to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the statute says “ all requests for a declaration by the President that a major disaster exists shall be made by the Governor of the affected State.
” So , as Millhiser notes , Trump “ can not simply issue a declaration and seize broad new powers.
” There ’ s still plenty the US government can do under this act , including coordinating relief efforts , helping state governments , and handing out food and medicine as needed .
If the military can be helpful in any of those endeavors , HHS @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ s governor can ask the Pentagon for assistance with them .
As for the National Emergencies Act , it gives the president more sweeping authorities , Elizabeth Goiten , the co-director of the Liberty and National Security Program at the Brennan Center , wrote for the Atlantic on Monday .
For Trump to use those authorities , though , he must “ specify which powers he intends to invoke , and he must issue updates if he adds new powers to the list , ” she explained .
It ’ s therefore @ @ @ @ @ @ @ could order the military to do more than a state ’ s governor wants , but he ’ d have to notify everyone of those intentions .
What ’ s most likely to happen , though , is that the military will abide by its long-standing process and doctrine of “ Defense Support for Civilian Authorities , ” or DSCA .
For emergencies in the homeland like the coronavirus outbreak , the military sees its role as providing “ support to prepare , prevent , protect , respond , and recover from domestic @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in response to requests from civil authorities and upon approval from appropriate authorities.
” US troops , then , won ’ t start deploying to parts of the country without HHS or other government agencies asking them to , and even then the military will act strictly in support of what that agency wants .
In essence , Trump couldn ’ t use the military as his own personal coronavirus response force and law enforcement agency .
It ’ ll be subordinate to the government agencies that request its assistance .
How a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ is highly dependent on a state ’ s governor .
HHS has already asked the Pentagon for help with quarantining Americans coming back from Wuhan , China — where the outbreak started — as well as infected passengers aboard the Diamond Princess cruise liner .
Military officials are also at the 11 feeder airports that passengers from abroad must go through for medical screenings before entering the US .
But so far , that ’ s it .
“ We ’ ve not received any other [ requests ] at this time , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ spokesperson , told reporters on Monday .
Yet experts tell me that , if states and agencies would just request it , the Pentagon could be even more helpful .
How the military can help the US coronavirus response There are four main ways the US military could assist in the country ’ s pandemic response : 1 ) provide care ; 2 ) assist with logistics ; 3 ) develop a vaccine or other treatment ; and 4 ) control crowds and provide other calming effects .
Even as Americans aim to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ coronavirus cases in the country low , hospitals find that they ’ re struggling to keep up with the number of patients that need medical care .
A dearth of hospital beds , ventilators , and rested physicians means a spike in people requiring hospitalization could greatly overwhelm the civilian health system .
Should those resources run low , the Defense Department “ could use authorities under the Defense Production Act to rapidly acquire a range of equipment such as N-95 respirators , gloves for medical personnel , and ventilators , ” James @ @ @ @ @ @ @ from 2012 to 2014 , told me .
The military also has thousands of physicians who could help treat patients .
Dr. Angela Rasmussen , an infectious disease expert at Columbia University , told me the military could create new hospitals if needed — as New York Gov .
Andrew Cuomo called on the Army Corps of Engineers to do — or repurpose current ones , for example by converting parts of hospitals into intensive care units .
But it should be noted that the military isn ’ t completely stocked up to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ mentioned before , the Pentagon has fewer than 40 military hospitals , each of them small and geared toward healing troops in specific communities .
“ Our fixed facilities are designed to the force that we have there — not 1,000-bed medical centers all over the United States , ” Friedrichs , the Joint Staff surgeon , told reporters on Monday .
By contrast , there are around 6,000 civilian hospitals in the country up and running today .
And while the military also has 424 medical clinics , including a massive hospital @ @ @ @ @ @ @ re not built to quarantine patients that have the disease .
Still , if there are many patients who require care at one time , the military would surely look to house them on their military bases as a kind of overflow facility .
The Department of Veterans Affairs ( VA ) could also lend its doctors and facilities for the response if the VA secretary authorizes their use .
“ The VA system was explicitly designed with the idea of not only treating veterans but providing redundancy for the civilian system , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ aide to former Defense Secretary Ash Carter .
And the VA says it ’ s ready to help if called upon .
“ VA stands ready to surge capabilities into civilian health care systems in the event those systems encounter capacity issues , but at this time they are not encountering such issues , ” Christina Mandreucci , the VA ’ s press secretary , told me .
“ Requests for such support would flow through the HHS , which is leading the federal government ’ s Covid-19 response efforts.
” But should @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ) — a government program consisting of about 5,000 medical professionals — be called into action by a state or the federal government , the VA would play a huge role in making it work .
“ The VA is the backbone for the NDMS , ” said Anthony Principi , the VA secretary from 2001 to 2005 .
When I asked a current Marine officer how the military could best help if called upon , the officer ’ s response was short and to the point : “ We are good at @ @ @ @ @ @ @ trucks , warehouses , and people , ” the officer continued , “ plus a few cargo planes and helicopters.
” In other words , the military is full of highly trained professionals with top-of-the-line equipment that could be incredibly useful for transporting civilian officials and materials around the country .
That last part is key as doctors may need additional medical tools quickly to treat patients , or those in affected areas might require food and water to survive .
Indeed , if so many people are sick that even grocery stores @ @ @ @ @ @ @ all the sustenance they can get .
Only the military , really , has the trucks , helicopters , and planes necessary to deliver everything in an efficient manner .
They ’ d also prove useful should someone require a medical evacuation .
Armed forces could coordinate all this in command and control centers , Barry McCaffrey , a retired Army general , told me .
That would help streamline all these efforts so the response isn ’ t so haphazard .
Experts also noted that the armed forces have communications equipment allowing @ @ @ @ @ @ @ government .
For example , if there needs to be a teleconference meeting , the military has the technology to set up such a meeting for personnel stationed in remote places .
And troops can offer generators to provide electricity around the clock if needed .
Generators are especially useful for field hospitals or if electrical workers in a particularly badly affected area have to stay home .
But , here again , there ’ s still a problem .
The military is failing to come up with money for its own coronavirus @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Trump administration efforts to cut the amount of military medical personnel the US can have by 18,000 , or 20 percent of the force .
3 ) Help develop a vaccine or effective treatment for the virus The Army leads the US military ’ s medical research , primarily at Fort Detrick in Maryland .
Gen. James McConville , the Army ’ s chief , told Breaking Defense earlier this month that there are already researchers working on finding a vaccine for the novel coronavirus .
“ They ’ ve been dealing with @ @ @ @ @ @ @ with Zika , they ’ ve been dealing with MERS , and now they ’ re dealing with coronavirus , ” McConville said .
Weber , the Pentagon ’ s former top bioweapons expert , told me that the only viable vaccine candidates and experimental drugs created during the 2014 Ebola crisis came from the Pentagon ( in partnership with the Canadian Ministry of Defense ) .
Once it looked like that vaccine could work , the National Institutes of Health took it “ the last 10 yards , ” said Weber .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ Columbia ’ s Rasmussen told me that other Pentagon agencies , such as the Defense Threats Reduction Agency and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency ( DARPA ) , are working on tools that could potentially help fight the virus .
In DARPA ’ s case , it has a program called the Pandemic Prevention Platform that will “ temporarily protect someone from contracting the virus before a vaccine is ready , ” Amy Jenkins , the program ’ s director , told NPR in February .
Basically , it ’ s a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ for about six months .
It serves as a temporary fix while waiting for a vaccine that can take several weeks to kick in , and it consists of antibodies from people who ’ ve had Covid-19 and recovered .
“ This technology could be used in this current coronavirus , ” she said , “ but this is still a very early technology.
” At the time of the interview , Jenkins noted that the technology might be available within 90 days .
The military ’ s manpower could be helpful in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ They could direct traffic at drive-through testing centers , for example , or control the flow of entries at medical facilities .
This would mostly be a job for the National Guard , the Marine officer told me , as people tend to freak out if they see other services trying to keep people calm within the US .
And , as mentioned above , there are legal reasons why the National Guard would have to be the service doing the crowd control work and not the federal military .
So far there @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in 15 states .
The public ’ s trust in the military might help calm nerves that the US government has the situation under control .
“ It would give the American public confidence , ” Weber told me .
Experts told me it ’ s therefore surprising that Esper and Army Gen. Mark Milley , the Joint Chiefs chair , haven ’ t been more visible so far in reassuring the nation that all will be well .
The risks of having the military involved in the coronavirus response While everyone I @ @ @ @ @ @ @ role to play , many noted that deploying the armed forces also comes with very real risks .
One Air Force officer I talked to worried about exposing troops to sick people , which could increase the number of cases in the ranks .
Having a large number of mostly young service members around crowds could also cause the virus to spread , since younger people may be infected without showing any symptoms .
“ That hurts our ability to respond without endangering the very people we intend to protect , ” the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ is already reluctant to help with pandemic response .
During the 2014 Ebola crisis , former defense officials told me , top military officials didn ’ t want 4,000 US troops going to West Africa to help .
The feeling among some US uniformed leaders was that America ’ s service members should be focused on fighting wars , not curing diseases .
Under immense White House pressure , though , the military did deploy and by most accounts proved instrumental in quelling the crisis .
Today ’ s military brass seems to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Department is still mainly focused on the health of the force .
From March 16 to May 11 , for example , troops aren ’ t allowed to travel domestically .
It ’ s unclear that Pentagon leadership has turned its attention to a national response yet , experts tell me .
The Air Force officer has one theory as to why that may be : Surging military physicians to treat civilians means there ’ s a “ risk of no treatment for your defense force in an era where soldiers are still @ @ @ @ @ @ @ is firing missiles into the East Sea , ” the officer said .
“ There ’ s still an argument for readiness ” — meaning the military ’ s ability to respond to any contingency — “ and our physicians and medical professionals help us maintain that posture.
” Other experts also noted that the Trump administration wants the armed forces focused on “ great power competition ” — preparing for fighting major wars in the future with the likes of China and Russia .
If troops start spending months on the coronavirus @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to engage in those conflicts .
Despite those concerns , though , most I spoke with believe Trump will turn to the military sooner rather than later — though they wish he ’ d done so earlier .
“ He downplayed the virus , and appeared not to understand what was happening , let alone what was coming , ” Miller told me .
“ The price will be paid in American lives .
”

The Pentagon just offered ventilators for the coronavirus response. It could do much more.
Share All sharing options for: The Pentagon just offered ventilators for the coronavirus response. It could do much more.
With civilian hospitals increasingly overwhelmed and the coronavirus outbreak in America deepening, a question is coming up of whether there’s a bigger role the US military to play in responding.
President Donald Trump isn’t so sure, yet.
“We’re starting the process. And it’s a process — we hope it’s not going to be necessary, but it could be necessary,” he said during the White House briefing on Tuesday morning.
Hours later, Defense Secretary Mark Esper said the Pentagon would at least offer some support. He told reporters that his department would be willing to offer up to 2,000 ventilators and 5 million respirators if asked, as well as offer labs to test civilians for the disease.
But, Esper made sure to say, he believes calling up military to help in the coronavirus response should be a “last resort.”
That’s not all. The US military will also be sending the US Army Corps of Engineers to New York state to assess how to build more medical centers, and it will deploy the USNS Comfort — a large medical ship with room for 1,000 patients — off the coast of New York.
Experts tell me the Pentagon’s actions are a good start, but that defense officials could still do much, much more.
For over a century, America’s armed forces have dealt with medical crises across the globe. Many service members today have the expertise to assist with medical care; build MASH hospitals; provide shelter; or transport food, medical equipment, and people to meet the needs of the public. That’s already happening in Georgia and Florida and New York, for example, where those states’ National Guards were called to help combat Covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus.
“The Department of Defense provides the ability to scale up like no other part of the US government can,” Andrew Weber, the Pentagon’s top biological defense official from 2011 to 2014, told me. “Whatever is needed to mount an appropriate response, the military can do it at scale.”
It’s important to note that America’s troops wouldn’t be leading efforts to combat Covid-19. They’d be supporting civilian leaders from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) or the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) with extra people, expertise, and technology.
That’s likely why, during the Democratic presidential debate on Sunday night, former Vice President Joe Biden called for the military to be deployed across America. “It’s a national emergency, and I would call out the military,” he said. “We’re at war with the virus.”
But the military’s involvement isn’t a panacea, and it has strict limitations on what it can do. Laws prohibit most troops from performing law enforcement functions, for example, and its actions are curtailed to helping states with things like emergency medical treatment and evacuations.
What’s more, the military only has a few small hospitals in the United States that are set up to treat military medical problems like bodily trauma, top Pentagon officials told reporters on Monday. Those facilities aren’t particularly ready to deal with the coronavirus outbreak or provide what civilian hospitals might need.
In other words, the military can help, but it can’t solve the government’s response problems. It also doesn’t help that the Army alone, for instance, is short $1 billion to respond to the outbreak. “We’re trying to be very careful about not overpromising,” Air Force Brig. Gen. Paul Friedrichs, the Joint Staff surgeon, told reporters on Monday. However, experts and some at the Pentagon believe the military can come up with the money to help if it wanted to.
As of now, there’s no real indication Trump wants to deploy the military. Most jarring is that he doesn’t have a senior Pentagon official on his Coronavirus Task Force. (It’s possible the military doesn’t want to be involved — more on that later.)
It’s therefore not as easy a call for Trump to make as some might think, but the dozen current and former defense officials and medical experts I spoke with say he should still use his authority to put the military to work now.
“There’s just so much capacity in the Defense Department that’s completely untapped at the moment, and that’s a mistake,” Kelly Magsamen, a former top Pentagon official in the Obama administration, told me.
The legality of using the US military in the coronavirus response
Before going into what the military could do to help with the coronavirus, it’s first important to know what it’s allowed to do at the president’s request.
The US military is barred from using its capabilities directly to enforce US domestic laws unless Congress specifically authorizes it to do so. This stipulation, known as “posse comitatus,” is why US troops can only support civilian agencies like FEMA but not take direct action themselves. Per FEMA’s own website, the military is prohibited from interdicting “vehicles, conducting searches and seizures, making arrests or apprehensions, surveillance, investigation, or undercover work.”
There’s no indication that long-standing statute is going to change anytime soon. However, this rule doesn’t apply to the National Guard and the Coast Guard — which means both services could perform law enforcement functions if asked by a state’s governor. That means they could conceivably block roads or keep people from visiting family and friends, though that would be a severe response and it’s unclear any governor wants to authorize that yet.
The president, or at least his lawyers, knows all this. On Friday, Trump issued two declarations to deal with the outbreak: one reliant on the Stafford Act, and one based on the National Emergencies Act.
As my colleague Ian Millhiser wrote, “Title IV of the Stafford Act permits the president to declare that a particular crisis is a ‘major disaster,’ and such a declaration does provide the president with new powers that he may use to combat such a disaster.” Additionally, the statute says “all requests for a declaration by the President that a major disaster exists shall be made by the Governor of the affected State.”
So, as Millhiser notes, Trump “cannot simply issue a declaration and seize broad new powers.”
There’s still plenty the US government can do under this act, including coordinating relief efforts, helping state governments, and handing out food and medicine as needed. If the military can be helpful in any of those endeavors, HHS, another agency, or a state’s governor can ask the Pentagon for assistance with them.
As for the National Emergencies Act, it gives the president more sweeping authorities, Elizabeth Goiten, the co-director of the Liberty and National Security Program at the Brennan Center, wrote for the Atlantic on Monday. For Trump to use those authorities, though, he must “specify which powers he intends to invoke, and he must issue updates if he adds new powers to the list,” she explained.
It’s therefore possible that under this statute, Trump could order the military to do more than a state’s governor wants, but he’d have to notify everyone of those intentions.
What’s most likely to happen, though, is that the military will abide by its long-standing process and doctrine of “Defense Support for Civilian Authorities,” or DSCA.
For emergencies in the homeland like the coronavirus outbreak, the military sees its role as providing “support to prepare, prevent, protect, respond, and recover from domestic incidents.” Such support is “provided in response to requests from civil authorities and upon approval from appropriate authorities.”
US troops, then, won’t start deploying to parts of the country without HHS or other government agencies asking them to, and even then the military will act strictly in support of what that agency wants.
In essence, Trump couldn’t use the military as his own personal coronavirus response force and law enforcement agency. It’ll be subordinate to the government agencies that request its assistance. How a National Guard unit acts, though, is highly dependent on a state’s governor.
HHS has already asked the Pentagon for help with quarantining Americans coming back from Wuhan, China — where the outbreak started — as well as infected passengers aboard the Diamond Princess cruise liner. Military officials are also at the 11 feeder airports that passengers from abroad must go through for medical screenings before entering the US.
But so far, that’s it. “We’ve not received any other [requests] at this time,” Jonathan Hoffman, a top Pentagon spokesperson, told reporters on Monday.
Yet experts tell me that, if states and agencies would just request it, the Pentagon could be even more helpful.
How the military can help the US coronavirus response
There are four main ways the US military could assist in the country’s pandemic response: 1) provide care; 2) assist with logistics; 3) develop a vaccine or other treatment; and 4) control crowds and provide other calming effects.
1) Provide care
Even as Americans aim to “flatten the curve” to keep coronavirus cases in the country low, hospitals find that they’re struggling to keep up with the number of patients that need medical care. A dearth of hospital beds, ventilators, and rested physicians means a spike in people requiring hospitalization could greatly overwhelm the civilian health system.
Should those resources run low, the Defense Department “could use authorities under the Defense Production Act to rapidly acquire a range of equipment such as N-95 respirators, gloves for medical personnel, and ventilators,” James Miller, the top Pentagon policy official from 2012 to 2014, told me.
The military also has thousands of physicians who could help treat patients. Dr. Angela Rasmussen, an infectious disease expert at Columbia University, told me the military could create new hospitals if needed — as New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo called on the Army Corps of Engineers to do — or repurpose current ones, for example by converting parts of hospitals into intensive care units.
But it should be noted that the military isn’t completely stocked up to help on all of this. As mentioned before, the Pentagon has fewer than 40 military hospitals, each of them small and geared toward healing troops in specific communities. “Our fixed facilities are designed to the force that we have there — not 1,000-bed medical centers all over the United States,” Friedrichs, the Joint Staff surgeon, told reporters on Monday.
By contrast, there are around 6,000 civilian hospitals in the country up and running today.
And while the military also has 424 medical clinics, including the USNS Comfort, they’re not built to quarantine patients that have the disease. Still, if there are many patients who require care at one time, the military would surely look to house them on their military bases as a kind of overflow facility.
The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) could also lend its doctors and facilities for the response if the VA secretary authorizes their use. “The VA system was explicitly designed with the idea of not only treating veterans but providing redundancy for the civilian system,” said Sasha Baker, a top aide to former Defense Secretary Ash Carter.
And the VA says it’s ready to help if called upon. “VA stands ready to surge capabilities into civilian health care systems in the event those systems encounter capacity issues, but at this time they are not encountering such issues,” Christina Mandreucci, the VA’s press secretary, told me. “Requests for such support would flow through the HHS, which is leading the federal government’s Covid-19 response efforts.”
But should the National Disaster Medical System (NDMS) — a government program consisting of about 5,000 medical professionals — be called into action by a state or the federal government, the VA would play a huge role in making it work. “The VA is the backbone for the NDMS,” said Anthony Principi, the VA secretary from 2001 to 2005.
2) Assist with logistics
When I asked a current Marine officer how the military could best help if called upon, the officer’s response was short and to the point: “We are good at logistics.”
“We’ve got trucks, warehouses, and people,” the officer continued, “plus a few cargo planes and helicopters.” In other words, the military is full of highly trained professionals with top-of-the-line equipment that could be incredibly useful for transporting civilian officials and materials around the country.
That last part is key as doctors may need additional medical tools quickly to treat patients, or those in affected areas might require food and water to survive. Indeed, if so many people are sick that even grocery stores close down, they’ll need all the sustenance they can get. Only the military, really, has the trucks, helicopters, and planes necessary to deliver everything in an efficient manner. They’d also prove useful should someone require a medical evacuation.
Armed forces could coordinate all this in command and control centers, Barry McCaffrey, a retired Army general, told me. That would help streamline all these efforts so the response isn’t so haphazard.
Experts also noted that the armed forces have communications equipment allowing better coordination among several parts of the government. For example, if there needs to be a teleconference meeting, the military has the technology to set up such a meeting for personnel stationed in remote places.
And troops can offer generators to provide electricity around the clock if needed. Generators are especially useful for field hospitals or if electrical workers in a particularly badly affected area have to stay home.
But, here again, there’s still a problem. The military is failing to come up with money for its own coronavirus response. Part of that comes from Trump administration efforts to cut the amount of military medical personnel the US can have by 18,000, or 20 percent of the force.
3) Help develop a vaccine or effective treatment for the virus
The Army leads the US military’s medical research, primarily at Fort Detrick in Maryland. Gen. James McConville, the Army’s chief, told Breaking Defense earlier this month that there are already researchers working on finding a vaccine for the novel coronavirus. “They’ve been dealing with Ebola, they’ve been dealing with Zika, they’ve been dealing with MERS, and now they’re dealing with coronavirus,” McConville said.
Weber, now at the Council on Strategic Risks, told me that the only viable vaccine candidates and experimental drugs created during the 2014 Ebola crisis came from the Pentagon (in partnership with the Canadian Ministry of Defense). Once it looked like that vaccine could work, the National Institutes of Health took it “the last 10 yards,” said Weber.
But that’s not all. Columbia’s Rasmussen told me that other Pentagon agencies, such as the Defense Threats Reduction Agency and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), are working on tools that could potentially help fight the virus.
In DARPA’s case, it has a program called the Pandemic Prevention Platform that will “temporarily protect someone from contracting the virus before a vaccine is ready,” Amy Jenkins, the program’s director, told NPR in February.
Basically, it’s a treatment that protects someone from the virus for about six months. It serves as a temporary fix while waiting for a vaccine that can take several weeks to kick in, and it consists of antibodies from people who’ve had Covid-19 and recovered. “This technology could be used in this current coronavirus,” she said, “but this is still a very early technology.”
At the time of the interview, Jenkins noted that the technology might be available within 90 days.
4) Crowd control and calming effects
The military’s manpower could be helpful in managing large crowds, experts say. They could direct traffic at drive-through testing centers, for example, or control the flow of entries at medical facilities.
This would mostly be a job for the National Guard, the Marine officer told me, as people tend to freak out if they see other services trying to keep people calm within the US.
And, as mentioned above, there are legal reasons why the National Guard would have to be the service doing the crowd control work and not the federal military.
So far there are about 670 National Guard members activated in 15 states.
The public’s trust in the military might help calm nerves that the US government has the situation under control. “It would give the American public confidence,” Weber told me.
Experts told me it’s therefore surprising that Esper and Army Gen. Mark Milley, the Joint Chiefs chair, haven’t been more visible so far in reassuring the nation that all will be well.
The risks of having the military involved in the coronavirus response
While everyone I spoke with said the military had some role to play, many noted that deploying the armed forces also comes with very real risks.
One Air Force officer I talked to worried about exposing troops to sick people, which could increase the number of cases in the ranks. Having a large number of mostly young service members around crowds could also cause the virus to spread, since younger people may be infected without showing any symptoms. “That hurts our ability to respond without endangering the very people we intend to protect,” the officer said.
Plus, the military is already reluctant to help with pandemic response.
During the 2014 Ebola crisis, former defense officials told me, top military officials didn’t want 4,000 US troops going to West Africa to help. The feeling among some US uniformed leaders was that America’s service members should be focused on fighting wars, not curing diseases. Under immense White House pressure, though, the military did deploy and by most accounts proved instrumental in quelling the crisis.
Today’s military brass seems to hold similar views, as the Defense Department is still mainly focused on the health of the force. From March 16 to May 11, for example, troops aren’t allowed to travel domestically. It’s unclear that Pentagon leadership has turned its attention to a national response yet, experts tell me.
The Air Force officer has one theory as to why that may be: Surging military physicians to treat civilians means there’s a “risk of no treatment for your defense force in an era where soldiers are still getting rocket attacked downrange and North Korea is firing missiles into the East Sea,” the officer said. “There’s still an argument for readiness” — meaning the military’s ability to respond to any contingency — “and our physicians and medical professionals help us maintain that posture.”
Other experts also noted that the Trump administration wants the armed forces focused on “great power competition” — preparing for fighting major wars in the future with the likes of China and Russia. If troops start spending months on the coronavirus crisis, they might be less prepared to engage in those conflicts.
Despite those concerns, though, most I spoke with believe Trump will turn to the military sooner rather than later — though they wish he’d done so earlier.
“He downplayed the virus, and appeared not to understand what was happening, let alone what was coming,” Miller told me. “The price will be paid in American lives.”


vox--2020-03-17--The best $29.95 I ever spent: A lumbar pillow

The first time my now-husband drove me someplace , I noticed what struck me as a funny habit — or , more accurately , a funny possession of his .
Whenever Greg got into the car to drive , he would place a small , floppy , roughly cylindrical pillow under his butt .
More accurately , he would put it behind his lower back , but no matter ; I spent the next three years of our relationship calling it his “ butt pillow ” ( “ Here , you left your butt pillow on the passenger seat ” @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
In my defense , I ’ d never seen such a thing before .
Good-natured and easygoing , he would let it go , with a little sigh and a corrective “ It ’ s a lumbar support pillow ” muttered under his breath .
Then , a couple of months ago , I was driving us home from visiting Greg ’ s family in rural Alabama .
It was a four-and-a-half-hour drive , a stultifying slog up Interstate 65 , which I decided it was my spousal duty to manage entirely @ @ @ @ @ @ @ there , just that morning .
Entering the third hour of the journey , the usual you ’ ve-been-sitting-too-long suspects began to act up : My knees creaked , my neck cramped , my back tensed , then spasmed .
“ Ugh , my whole body hurts , ” I griped , making minute , futile adjustments to my position .
“ I can ’ t believe we have another hour and a half of this.
” “ You know what ?
” Greg declared .
“ Just try this damn thing already.
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ into the space between my lower back and the seat — and something incredible happened .
The clouds parted ; the angels sang ; my back popped easily back into alignment .
The stiffness dissipated ; my shoulders relaxed ; my spine straightened and elongated , like a cat stretching to its full length .
I let out an unearthly groan of pleasure , and then I thought , Oh , shit .
Oops .
“ This thing is amazing , ” I said .
“ I can ’ t believe you didn @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ” I didn ’ t turn to look Greg in the eye .
Sometimes , when you ’ re proven so utterly and reprehensibly wrong , after affirming your wrong belief in word and deed for so long , all you can do to deflect the ire of the vindicated is pretend history never happened .
Instead , when we got home , I tweeted : “ I ’ m an idiot.
” Back pain forms a perfect metonym for the entropy that defines , well , spending a lifetime slowly dying Really @ @ @ @ @ @ @ I try the damned pillow sooner ?
Usually I heed my husband ’ s health advice ; he is a doctor , after all .
I suppose I thought : Greg ’ s a bit delicate , and this is just one of his things , like his knee brace , or his sacroiliac joint pain , or how sometimes he wakes up with such a crick in his neck he has to roll it around for 20 minutes before he can function .
I mean , this is a man who once @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
I ’ m not that fragile .
Not enough to need this kind of aid — an unseemly adjunct , an implicit admission of the need for help .
And for driving , of all activities !
I thought of that question they ask at the doctor ’ s office : Are you unable to perform everyday tasks like bathing and dressing ?
Well , what about driving ?
What could be more everyday than that ?
After I took the first step on the path to butt pillow acceptance , I @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and considered the history of my body .
At 32 , I ’ m not old , but I ’ m not so young either , and I ’ m starting to feel it .
The chronic migraines I ’ ve had since age 6 show no signs of abating ; if anything , they ’ re becoming more resistant to the medications I ’ ve used my whole life , and I bounce back more slowly from the bad ones .
In more recent news , after a decade of running , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ twinging at too steep a hill or too sharp a turn .
I have acid reflux — that ’ s novel and exciting .
My right elbow cracks every time I straighten my arm .
And I have a rotator cuff strain that has simply become part of my baseline anatomy , cackling , I imagine , at my halfhearted attempts to physical-therapy it into submission .
That ’ s pretty much what happens with musculoskeletal knocks as you age ; they don ’ t so much heal as accumulate , and you @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
Once the decay of the body starts , it doesn ’ t stop , but announces itself more loudly , at more moments in the day , until one ’ s mortal awareness never quite ceases , merely fades in the presence of distraction , until you go to get up from a deeply cushioned chair and find yourself emitting a sound like a dying goose .
Greg wasn ’ t in denial anymore .
Instead , he ’ d embraced what could help him bat away the incursions of the aging @ @ @ @ @ @ @ he ’ d told me he could never play soccer again ; his ankles wouldn ’ t tolerate the strain , and he wasn ’ t willing to risk it .
At the time , I ’ d scoffed .
Now , the narrowing field of my own athletic accomplishment — let alone day-to-day functioning — has come into much clearer focus .
I simply can ’ t run seven miles every day of the week anymore .
Some days , I ’ m too tired to walk the dog farther than around @ @ @ @ @ @ @ perfect metonym for the entropy that defines , well , spending a lifetime slowly dying .
If any part of the body won ’ t let you forget it — the randomness of it , the lack of good sense and planning — it ’ s your back .
It ’ s a well-established fact that the human back is garbage .
When humans became bipedal — when we stood up on two legs — our spines , evolved for climbing and moving in trees , rotated 90 degrees .
The human spine @ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ S , ” in order to accommodate the birth canal and balance the torso above our feet .
So this precariously curved , fragile object — actually 26 objects , composed of vertebrae and disks — bears immense pressure from its vertical load , which often results in back pain and sometimes injury .
On top of that , we make the situation even worse by sitting like earthbound legumes at desks , on couches , increasing our collective risk for cancer , cardiovascular disease , Type 2 diabetes , and early @ @ @ @ @ @ @ by some accounts , the most common physical ailment in the world , a major cause of disability and work absenteeism .
The World Health Organization estimates the lifetime prevalence of nonspecific ( common ) low back pain at 60 to 70 percent in industrialized countries .
Anyone could tell you they have a “ bad back ” and they ’ d be right .
Live long enough and you will , too .
Maladies of the back are as numberless and varied as the stars , and notoriously hard to cure : @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , dislocations , compression fractures , sciatica , scoliosis , kyphosis , spinal stenosis , ankylosing spondylitis .
It ’ s no wonder , then , that people have been seeking treatments and remedies for centuries .
From ice or heat to support accessories , rehab , steroid injections , and surgery , industries and medical subspecialties have sprouted around people ’ s back trouble .
Of these measures , lumbar support — designed to treat pain of the lumbar , or lower , spine — comes in several forms , including back @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
The evidence for use of these methods in treating low back pain is sketchy at best , but the effectiveness of pillow-like chair attachments has been examined .
A 2010 study published in the journal Spine found that both the angle of a chair ’ s backrest and the usage ( or non-usage ) of a lumbar roll are the two most important factors that contribute to a favorable alignment between the head , neck , and back .
Another , from 2013 , offered participants both a standard and lumbar support @ @ @ @ @ @ @ improved objective measures of comfort ( like frequency of changes in posture ) in subjects with and without low back pain .
The lumbar pillow is about as low-tech and low-risk as it gets .
Wirecutter endorsed some fancy-looking ones , but any somewhat pliable , narrow cushion you can place behind your low back will do .
I bought this one from Thermarest for $ 29.95 , but you don ’ t even need a pillow specifically designated back-supportive .
All you ’ re looking for is basically a wedge to fill @ @ @ @ @ @ @ natural curvature of your lower back .
One of those cheap airport neck pillows could work , too .
I ’ m drawn to the metaphor of the pillow filling a gap , the space between desire and reality , where our imperfections are revealed — and , often in middle age , cast into sharp relief .
Life gradually dismantles the illusion of invincibility , through injury or illness or mere exhaustion .
So we make concessions .
I , for one , have abandoned all shame at taking the elevator two @ @ @ @ @ @ @ social occasion to stay in and nurse a migraine .
So much the sweeter , the frank abundance of health which I ’ ve been fortunate to retain .
If we ’ re lucky and wise , we make peace with the vulnerability that attends the admission of one ’ s essential frailty .
To be clear , I ’ m not recommending a Pollyannaish optimism to people with disabilities ( of whom I count myself one ) ; at times , life is just shitty and painful , and no amount of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ But I would suggest that , in many ways , our limits are more interesting than our achievements , and they define us equally .
We are each of us limited , in different ways and at different times , and we will all one day face the final limit of our small existences .
United by our failings and restrictions , we might come to find them meaningful , or at least funny , which is all one can really ask .
As for me , despite not infrequent discomfort , I @ @ @ @ @ @ @ run long distances and lift moderately heavy objects ; I take walks with my husband and dog , cook dinner , sleep soundly most nights .
But I ’ m open to the eventuality of doing less well : of slowing down , needing help , savoring rest as much as activity .
And of looking ridiculous for refusing to undertake a long car trip without my weird little blue pillow , my faithful fellow in aging , with minimal kicking and screaming .
Jennifer R. Bernstein is a writer and cofounder of @ @ @ @

The first time my now-husband drove me someplace, I noticed what struck me as a funny habit — or, more accurately, a funny possession of his. Whenever Greg got into the car to drive, he would place a small, floppy, roughly cylindrical pillow under his butt.
More accurately, he would put it behind his lower back, but no matter; I spent the next three years of our relationship calling it his “butt pillow” (“Here, you left your butt pillow on the passenger seat”) and ragging him about it mercilessly. In my defense, I’d never seen such a thing before. Good-natured and easygoing, he would let it go, with a little sigh and a corrective “It’s a lumbar support pillow” muttered under his breath.
Then, a couple of months ago, I was driving us home from visiting Greg’s family in rural Alabama. It was a four-and-a-half-hour drive, a stultifying slog up Interstate 65, which I decided it was my spousal duty to manage entirely; he had driven the whole way there, just that morning. Entering the third hour of the journey, the usual you’ve-been-sitting-too-long suspects began to act up: My knees creaked, my neck cramped, my back tensed, then spasmed.
“Ugh, my whole body hurts,” I griped, making minute, futile adjustments to my position. “I can’t believe we have another hour and a half of this.”
“You know what?” Greg declared. “Just try this damn thing already.”
He shoved the little blue beanbag into the space between my lower back and the seat — and something incredible happened. The clouds parted; the angels sang; my back popped easily back into alignment. The stiffness dissipated; my shoulders relaxed; my spine straightened and elongated, like a cat stretching to its full length.
I let out an unearthly groan of pleasure, and then I thought, Oh, shit. Oops.
“This thing is amazing,” I said. “I can’t believe you didn’t make me try it sooner.”
I didn’t turn to look Greg in the eye. Sometimes, when you’re proven so utterly and reprehensibly wrong, after affirming your wrong belief in word and deed for so long, all you can do to deflect the ire of the vindicated is pretend history never happened. Instead, when we got home, I tweeted: “I’m an idiot.”
Back pain forms a perfect metonym for the entropy that defines, well, spending a lifetime slowly dying
Really, though: Why didn’t I try the damned pillow sooner? Usually I heed my husband’s health advice; he is a doctor, after all. I suppose I thought: Greg’s a bit delicate, and this is just one of his things, like his knee brace, or his sacroiliac joint pain, or how sometimes he wakes up with such a crick in his neck he has to roll it around for 20 minutes before he can function. I mean, this is a man who once dislocated his patella pivoting sideways too abruptly.
I’m not that fragile. Not enough to need this kind of aid — an unseemly adjunct, an implicit admission of the need for help. And for driving, of all activities! I thought of that question they ask at the doctor’s office: Are you unable to perform everyday tasks like bathing and dressing? Well, what about driving? What could be more everyday than that?
After I took the first step on the path to butt pillow acceptance, I rubbed a couple of brain cells together and considered the history of my body. At 32, I’m not old, but I’m not so young either, and I’m starting to feel it. The chronic migraines I’ve had since age 6 show no signs of abating; if anything, they’re becoming more resistant to the medications I’ve used my whole life, and I bounce back more slowly from the bad ones.
In more recent news, after a decade of running, my hamstrings have begun to complain, twinging at too steep a hill or too sharp a turn. I have acid reflux — that’s novel and exciting. My right elbow cracks every time I straighten my arm. And I have a rotator cuff strain that has simply become part of my baseline anatomy, cackling, I imagine, at my halfhearted attempts to physical-therapy it into submission.
That’s pretty much what happens with musculoskeletal knocks as you age; they don’t so much heal as accumulate, and you learn to live with and around them. Once the decay of the body starts, it doesn’t stop, but announces itself more loudly, at more moments in the day, until one’s mortal awareness never quite ceases, merely fades in the presence of distraction, until you go to get up from a deeply cushioned chair and find yourself emitting a sound like a dying goose.
Greg wasn’t in denial anymore. Instead, he’d embraced what could help him bat away the incursions of the aging process. When we first met, he’d told me he could never play soccer again; his ankles wouldn’t tolerate the strain, and he wasn’t willing to risk it. At the time, I’d scoffed. Now, the narrowing field of my own athletic accomplishment — let alone day-to-day functioning — has come into much clearer focus. I simply can’t run seven miles every day of the week anymore. Some days, I’m too tired to walk the dog farther than around the block.
Back pain forms a perfect metonym for the entropy that defines, well, spending a lifetime slowly dying. If any part of the body won’t let you forget it — the randomness of it, the lack of good sense and planning — it’s your back.
It’s a well-established fact that the human back is garbage. When humans became bipedal — when we stood up on two legs — our spines, evolved for climbing and moving in trees, rotated 90 degrees. The human spine, though, is shaped like an “S,” in order to accommodate the birth canal and balance the torso above our feet. So this precariously curved, fragile object — actually 26 objects, composed of vertebrae and disks — bears immense pressure from its vertical load, which often results in back pain and sometimes injury.
On top of that, we make the situation even worse by sitting like earthbound legumes at desks, on couches, increasing our collective risk for cancer, cardiovascular disease, Type 2 diabetes, and early death. Lower back pain is, by some accounts, the most common physical ailment in the world, a major cause of disability and work absenteeism. The World Health Organization estimates the lifetime prevalence of nonspecific (common) low back pain at 60 to 70 percent in industrialized countries. Anyone could tell you they have a “bad back” and they’d be right. Live long enough and you will, too.
Maladies of the back are as numberless and varied as the stars, and notoriously hard to cure: herniated discs, muscle strains, arthritis, dislocations, compression fractures, sciatica, scoliosis, kyphosis, spinal stenosis, ankylosing spondylitis. It’s no wonder, then, that people have been seeking treatments and remedies for centuries. From ice or heat to support accessories, rehab, steroid injections, and surgery, industries and medical subspecialties have sprouted around people’s back trouble.
Of these measures, lumbar support — designed to treat pain of the lumbar, or lower, spine — comes in several forms, including back braces, belts, and other orthotics. The evidence for use of these methods in treating low back pain is sketchy at best, but the effectiveness of pillow-like chair attachments has been examined. A 2010 study published in the journal Spine found that both the angle of a chair’s backrest and the usage (or non-usage) of a lumbar roll are the two most important factors that contribute to a favorable alignment between the head, neck, and back. Another, from 2013, offered participants both a standard and lumbar support chair; the support chair resulted in improved objective measures of comfort (like frequency of changes in posture) in subjects with and without low back pain.
The lumbar pillow is about as low-tech and low-risk as it gets. Wirecutter endorsed some fancy-looking ones, but any somewhat pliable, narrow cushion you can place behind your low back will do. I bought this one from Thermarest for $29.95, but you don’t even need a pillow specifically designated back-supportive. All you’re looking for is basically a wedge to fill the space between the seat and the natural curvature of your lower back. One of those cheap airport neck pillows could work, too.
I’m drawn to the metaphor of the pillow filling a gap, the space between desire and reality, where our imperfections are revealed — and, often in middle age, cast into sharp relief. Life gradually dismantles the illusion of invincibility, through injury or illness or mere exhaustion. So we make concessions. I, for one, have abandoned all shame at taking the elevator two or three floors, or canceling a social occasion to stay in and nurse a migraine. So much the sweeter, the frank abundance of health which I’ve been fortunate to retain.
If we’re lucky and wise, we make peace with the vulnerability that attends the admission of one’s essential frailty. To be clear, I’m not recommending a Pollyannaish optimism to people with disabilities (of whom I count myself one); at times, life is just shitty and painful, and no amount of conciliatory thinking can palliate that reality. But I would suggest that, in many ways, our limits are more interesting than our achievements, and they define us equally. We are each of us limited, in different ways and at different times, and we will all one day face the final limit of our small existences. United by our failings and restrictions, we might come to find them meaningful, or at least funny, which is all one can really ask.
As for me, despite not infrequent discomfort, I’m doing pretty well. I run long distances and lift moderately heavy objects; I take walks with my husband and dog, cook dinner, sleep soundly most nights. But I’m open to the eventuality of doing less well: of slowing down, needing help, savoring rest as much as activity. And of looking ridiculous for refusing to undertake a long car trip without my weird little blue pillow, my faithful fellow in aging, with minimal kicking and screaming.
Jennifer R. Bernstein is a writer and cofounder of the New Inquiry.


vox--2020-03-17--Coronavirus and the 2020 election: a collapsing economy is a disaster for the incumbent

Is the cratering economy going to damage Donald Trump ’ s chances of reelection ?
It ’ s a complicated question with no simple answer , but the signs point to yes .
We don ’ t yet know how badly the Covid-19 coronavirus pandemic will harm the US economy .
It seems likely , though , that widespread “ social distancing ” that has led to school and event cancellations and work-from-home edicts will devastate demand for services like restaurants , taxis , flights , hotels , etc.
, and make some in-person services difficult to perform in the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to a yoga class right now ? )
.
That ’ s a recipe for economic suffering ( and the market knows it ) .
The Trump administration is already pushing a payroll tax cut as a stimulus measure to limit the impact , while many lawmakers have pushed for even more drastic measures like cash transfers to all Americans .
The Fed , for its part , has already dramatically cut rates over coronavirus worries .
But if these efforts don ’ t suffice and the economy stagnates or even falls into @ @ @ @ @ @ @ severe .
Political scientists have known for decades that economic performance , especially in the short run , has a profound effect on election outcomes .
Some of the most influential forecasting models in the political science literature , like Michael Lewis-Beck and Charles Tien ’ s “ political economy ” model or Christopher Wlezien and Robert Erikson ’ s “ leading economic indicators ” model ( more on those below ) , put heavy weight on economic factors in predicting which party will win the popular vote .
In 2016 these models @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and Trump right with a typical error of a percentage point or less ( the Electoral College , of course , meant that popular vote winner ultimately lost the race ) .
So the economy matters .
But what ’ s less obvious — and important when evaluating what a late-breaking economic crisis like the coronavirus panic will mean in an election year — is how the economy matters .
Does long-run economic performance matter more , or just the economy ’ s health during the election year ?
Do most voters “ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ summer , such that a turn in the fall isn ’ t likely to swing elections ?
Or are perceptions of the economy what matters , rather than people ’ s actual material economic circumstances ?
We don ’ t have firm answers to all these questions .
That ’ s especially true if we ’ re specifically interested in US presidential elections — we simply don ’ t have that many elections to study .
There have been only 18 presidential elections since World War II , and that includes elections when @ @ @ @ @ @ @ We ’ re also limited because not every possible economic scenario has played out in the past ; the only recession on record to start in the spring of a presidential election year was 60 years ago , and I can ’ t think of a precedent for a pandemic-provoked recession in a presidential year .
In other words , if we ’ re in genuinely uncharted waters , we know a lot less .
But we do know some things about how the economy matters .
People tend to look about two @ @ @ @ @ @ @ which should give Donald Trump some hope that voters will take the solid economy of 2018 through early 2020 into account .
That said , a massive increase in unemployment and GDP dropoff right now could be serious enough to overwhelm whatever credit people are willing to give Trump for the past few years .
This situation really is unprecedented .
People do vote based on their individual pocketbooks , and when they do , they ’ re time-indifferent : Benefits a while ago still count for something .
That ’ s good @ @ @ @ @ @ @ gave some people big tax breaks in 2018 and gave surprise tax bills to others .
But it appears that overall economic impressions might outweigh individual economic performance .
Even people who are not themselves suffering might turn against the president if they perceive the economy to be in free fall .
With the economy poised to tumble , that ’ s really bad news for Donald Trump .
While voters won ’ t forget the good economic times , a recession or slowdown right now will likely damage him badly .
It @ @ @ @ @ @ @ economic performance can swing an election .
Barack Obama won by a large margin amid the economic crisis of late 2008 that Americans pinned on the incumbent party ; America ’ s slow recovery from recession contributed to Bill Clinton ’ s defeat of George H.W .
Bush in 1992 , the last time an incumbent president has lost reelection .
But how the economy matters is more complicated .
Whereas the US had been in recession for nearly a year in November 2008 , the 1992 election came long after the recession @ @ @ @ @ @ @ recession that contributed to Jimmy Carter ’ s defeat later that year was done by July , and the incumbent party candidate Richard Nixon nearly won in 1960 despite the election occurring in the midst of a mild recession .
Political scientists have sought to find a pattern in these developments .
The most comprehensive recent paper on the question of economic timing and American elections comes from UT-Austin ’ s Christopher Wlezien .
His 2015 paper was something of a response to what had been a common economic approach used in predicting @ @ @ @ @ @ @ model of Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels .
Achen and Bartels argued that voters ’ disposable income growth in the two quarters before the election ( Q2 and Q3 of the election year , covering , say , April 1 , 2020 , to September 30 , 2020 ) has high predictive power , but adding in previous economic data doesn ’ t improve predictions at all .
The implication was that voters are incredibly myopic : they only care about economic performance in the election year and not before .
This added @ @ @ @ @ @ @ intellectual project of demonstrating that voting in US elections is arbitrary and makes democratic accountability next to impossible .
Wlezien found that there was some truth to the idea that voters are myopic , but the problem isn ’ t quite as severe as Achen and Bartels made it out to be .
Whether you look at income growth , GDP growth , or polls of consumer sentiment , measures taken the year of the election and measures taken a year earlier do about equally well at predicting election outcomes .
Beyond one @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
But the two years before an election seem to matter , not just a few months .
“ [ Voters ] do not look into the distant past , but they do look fairly far , about two years back , ” Wlezien concludes .
“ They also appear to see fairly clearly , accurately reflecting economic growth during that period .
It may not give us reason to offer up three cheers for representative democracy , but it may give us reason to think that elections aren ’ t simply a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ s just one theory , of course , and academics have explored this question in other ways .
One big question that has loomed over elections is whether voters are influenced by the reality of the economy — or by their perceptions of the economy .
Wlezien and his frequent co-author Robert Erikson have found good forecasting results using the Conference Board ’ s Leading Economic Index ( LEI ) measure , a weighted average of many objective economic measures ( average hours worked in manufacturing , unemployment insurance claims , stock prices @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ( consumer expectations ) .
As of January , the LEI was still increasing in the US , but Wlezien and Eriksen ’ s model relies on the LEI measure for the full first quarter of the election year , which includes numbers for February and March that aren ’ t out yet .
Lewis-Beck and Tien ’ s “ political economy ” model has also historically performed well and simply uses economic growth ( measured in gross national product , not gross domestic product ) for the first two quarters of the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ economic well-being .
But note that they have an additional quarter of data to rely on , requiring them to wait until after June to forecast , whereas the Wlezien/Erikson model , which relies only on quarter one which ends in March , allows us to make predictions about the election earlier in the cycle .
The fact that objective measures of economic growth correlate well with eventual outcomes suggests that underlying economic experiences , not just perceptions , might drive election outcomes .
There ’ s some evidence for this abroad , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ income tax records public .
Anyone can look up anyone else ’ s tax bill .
That means political scientists can match election polls to the actual incomes of Swedish people .
When Andrew Healy , Mikael Persson , and Erik Snowberg did just that , they found that personal finances were as important in determining votes as national economic conditions ; both mattered , and people ’ s evaluations of their personal finances were less biased , based on their individual politics , than their evaluations of the national economy .
Moreover @ @ @ @ @ @ @ voting isn ’ t myopic : Unlike voting based on the national economy , it can be affected by changes years in the past , and indeed a low-income tax cut implemented by the right-wing Alliance coalition in 2006 increased votes for the Alliance in 2010 .
That suggests that the tax cuts early in Trump ’ s turn could still matter , both positively ( for upper-middle-class voters who benefited ) and negatively ( because of the withholding fiasco that denied many people expected refunds in 2019 ) .
But as Healy @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the overall economy matter too .
And the perceptions themselves matter above and beyond the objective reality .
Some of the best evidence for this point comes from Mark Andreas Kayser and Arndt Leininger , who found that using first-pass economic data from US statistical agencies leads to more accurate election forecasts than using more accurate , corrected data released later on .
That ’ s a decent indication that economic perceptions , which are presumably driven more by data released in an election year than data released after the fact , matter @ @ @ @ @ @ @ them .
We don ’ t yet have sufficient data to run any of these models yet .
But here ’ s an illustrative example .
The Lewis-Beck/Tien model estimates the two-party vote share for the president ’ s party ( that is , for Trump ) as 37.50 plus .26 times the president ’ s popularity in the most recent Gallup poll ( 47 percent ) plus 1.17 times GNP growth in the first two quarters of the election year .
Let ’ s suppose that the first two quarters of 2020 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ 2008 , given that many economists expect this downturn to be even worse than that one .
GNP shrunk by about 2 percent during those quarters .
That spits out a prediction that Trump will get 47.4 percent of the two-party vote , for a loss of over 5 points .
That ’ s probably enough to overcome Trump ’ s big advantage in the electoral college .
I want to be very clear : The above is not a forecast .
We do not know how bad this economic crisis will get @ @ @ @ @ @ @ close to 2008 , the political consequences for Trump could be dire .

Is the cratering economy going to damage President Donald Trump’s chances of reelection? It’s a complicated question with no simple answer, but the signs point to yes.
We don’t yet know how badly the Covid-19 coronavirus pandemic will harm the US economy. It seems likely, though, that widespread “social distancing” that has led to school and event cancellations and work-from-home edicts will devastate demand for services like restaurants, taxis, flights, hotels, etc., and make some in-person services difficult to perform in the first place (who wants to go to a yoga class right now?).
That’s a recipe for economic suffering (and the market knows it). The Trump administration is already pushing a payroll tax cut as a stimulus measure to limit the impact, while many lawmakers have pushed for even more drastic measures like cash transfers to all Americans. The Fed, for its part, has already dramatically cut rates over coronavirus worries.
But if these efforts don’t suffice and the economy stagnates or even falls into recession, the political consequences will be severe. Political scientists have known for decades that economic performance, especially in the short run, has a profound effect on election outcomes.
Some of the most influential forecasting models in political science literature, like Michael Lewis-Beck and Charles Tien’s “political economy” model or Christopher Wlezien and Robert Erikson’s “leading economic indicators” model (more on those below), put heavy weight on economic factors in predicting which party will win the popular vote. In 2016, these models got the ultimate vote share of Clinton and Trump right with a typical error of a percentage point or less (the Electoral College, of course, meant that the popular vote winner ultimately lost the race).
So the economy matters. But what’s less obvious — and important when evaluating what a late-breaking economic crisis like the coronavirus panic will mean in an election year — is how the economy matters. Does long-run economic performance matter more, or just the economy’s health during the election year? Do most voters “lock in” their votes over the summer, such that a turn in the fall isn’t likely to swing elections? Or are perceptions of the economy what matters, rather than people’s actual material economic circumstances?
We don’t have firm answers to all these questions. That’s especially true if we’re specifically interested in US presidential elections — we simply don’t have that many elections to study. There have been only 18 presidential elections since World War II, and that includes elections when the political landscape was dramatically different.
We’re also limited because not every possible economic scenario has played out in the past; the only recession on record to start in the spring of a presidential election year was 60 years ago, and I can’t think of a precedent for a pandemic-provoked recession in a presidential year. In other words, if we’re in genuinely uncharted waters, we know a lot less.
But we do know some things about how the economy matters. People tend to look about two years back in evaluating economic performance, which should give Donald Trump some hope that voters will take the solid economy of 2018 through early 2020 into account. That said, a massive increase in unemployment and GDP dropoff right now could be serious enough to overwhelm whatever credit people are willing to give Trump for the past few years. This situation really is unprecedented.
People do vote based on their individual pocketbooks, and when they do, they’re time-indifferent: Benefits a while ago still count for something. That’s good and bad news for Trump because he gave some people big tax breaks in 2018 and gave surprise tax bills to others. But it appears that overall economic impressions might outweigh individual economic performance. Even people who are not themselves suffering might turn against the president if they perceive the economy to be in free fall.
With the economy poised to tumble, that’s really bad news for Donald Trump. While voters won’t forget the good economic times, a recession or slowdown right now will likely damage him badly.
When the economy matters
It’s hardly a secret that poor economic performance can swing an election. Barack Obama won by a large margin amid the economic crisis of late 2008 that Americans pinned on the incumbent party; America’s slow recovery from recession contributed to Bill Clinton’s defeat of George H.W. Bush in 1992, the last time an incumbent president has lost reelection.
But how the economy matters is more complicated. Whereas the US had been in recession for nearly a year in November 2008, the 1992 election came long after the recession ended in March 1991. The 1980 recession that contributed to Jimmy Carter’s defeat later that year was done by July, and the incumbent party candidate Richard Nixon nearly won in 1960 despite the election occurring in the midst of a mild recession.
Political scientists have sought to find a pattern in these developments.
The most comprehensive recent paper on the question of economic timing and American elections comes from UT-Austin’s Christopher Wlezien. His 2015 paper was something of a response to what had been a common economic approach used in predicting elections: the “musical chairs” model of Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels.
Achen and Bartels argued that voters’ disposable income growth in the two quarters before the election (Q2 and Q3 of the election year, covering, say, April 1, 2020, to September 30, 2020) has high predictive power, but adding in previous economic data doesn’t improve predictions at all.
The implication was that voters are incredibly myopic: They only care about economic performance in the election year and not before. This added weight to Achen and Bartels’s broader intellectual project of demonstrating that voting in US elections is arbitrary and makes democratic accountability next to impossible.
Wlezien found that there was some truth to the idea that voters are myopic, but the problem isn’t quite as severe as Achen and Bartels made it out to be. Whether you look at income growth, GDP growth, or polls of consumer sentiment, measures taken the year of the election and measures taken a year earlier do about equally well at predicting election outcomes. Beyond one year previous, you lose predictive power. But the two years before an election seem to matter, not just a few months.
“[Voters] do not look into the distant past, but they do look fairly far, about two years back,” Wlezien concludes. “They also appear to see fairly clearly, accurately reflecting economic growth during that period. It may not give us reason to offer up three cheers for representative democracy, but it may give us reason to think that elections aren’t simply a game of musical chairs.”
That’s just one theory, and academics have explored this question in other ways.
Why the economy matters
One big question that has loomed over elections is whether voters are influenced by the reality of the economy — or by their perceptions of the economy.
Wlezien and his frequent co-author Robert Erikson have found good forecasting results using the Conference Board’s Leading Economic Index (LEI) measure, a weighted average of many objective economic measures (average hours worked in manufacturing, unemployment insurance claims, stock prices, etc.) and subjective ones (consumer expectations). As of January, the LEI was still increasing in the US, but Wlezien and Eriksen’s model relies on the LEI measure for the full first quarter of the election year, which includes numbers for February and March that aren’t out yet.
Lewis-Beck and Tien’s “political economy” model has also historically performed well and simply uses economic growth (measured in gross national product, not gross domestic product) for the first two quarters of the election year — an objective measure of economic well-being. But note that they have an additional quarter of data to rely on, requiring them to wait until after June to forecast, whereas the Wlezien/Erikson model, which relies only on quarter one which ends in March, allows us to make predictions about the election earlier in the cycle.
The fact that objective measures of economic growth correlate well with eventual outcomes suggests that underlying economic experiences, not just perceptions, might drive election outcomes. There’s some evidence for this abroad, too. Sweden, unusually, makes income tax records public. Anyone can look up anyone else’s tax bill. That means political scientists can match election polls to the actual incomes of Swedish people.
When Andrew Healy, Mikael Persson, and Erik Snowberg did just that, they found that personal finances were as important in determining votes as national economic conditions; both mattered, and people’s evaluations of their personal finances were less biased, based on their individual politics, than their evaluations of the national economy. Moreover, this kind of “pocketbook” voting isn’t myopic: Unlike voting based on the national economy, it can be affected by changes years in the past, and indeed a low-income tax cut implemented by the right-wing Alliance coalition in 2006 increased votes for the Alliance in 2010.
That suggests that the tax cuts early in Trump’s turn could still matter, both positively (for upper-middle-class voters who benefited) and negatively (because of the withholding fiasco that denied many people expected refunds in 2019).
But as Healy et al also find, perceptions of the overall economy matter, too. And the perceptions themselves matter above and beyond the objective reality.
Some of the best evidence for this point comes from Mark Andreas Kayser and Arndt Leininger, who found that using first-pass economic data from US statistical agencies leads to more accurate election forecasts than using more accurate, corrected data released later on. That’s a decent indication that economic perceptions, which are presumably driven more by data released in an election year than data released after the fact, matter independently of the objective economic conditions driving them.
We don’t yet have sufficient data to run any of these models yet. But here’s an illustrative example. The Lewis-Beck/Tien model estimates the two-party vote share for the president’s party (that is, for Trump) as 37.50 plus 0.26 times the president’s popularity in the most recent Gallup poll (47 percent) plus 1.17 times GNP growth in the first two quarters of the election year.
Let’s suppose that the first two quarters of 2020 are like the final two quarters of 2008, given that many economists expect this downturn to be even worse than that one. GNP shrunk by about 2 percent during those quarters. That spits out a prediction that Trump will get 47.4 percent of the two-party vote, for a loss of over 5 points. That’s probably enough to overcome Trump’s big advantage in the electoral college.
I want to be very clear: The above is not a forecast. We do not know how bad this economic crisis will get. But if it’s even close to 2008, the political consequences for Trump could be dire.


March 17 primaries

Joe Biden is hoping to strengthen his delegate lead as voters in three states go to the polls on Tuesday .
A big night in the Democratic presidential primary will take place this Tuesday , March 17 — but not as large as was planned .
Three states — Arizona , Florida , and Illinois — will hold their primaries then ; until this week , Ohio was set to join them , but Gov .
Mike DeWine announced late on Monday that the state would delay in-person voting over the coronavirus outbreak .
March 17 is still one of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ calendar , behind Super Tuesday and a still-to-come slew of Eastern seaboard primaries on April 28 .
Florida has the most delegates on offer Tuesday , with 219 .
Voters in those states will be confronted with a much-reduced presidential field when they head to the polls : Only former Vice President Joe Biden and Sen. Bernie Sanders are still in the running for the nomination , though Rep. Tulsi Gabbard , with two delegates , is technically still in the race .
Biden leads in the FiveThirtyEight state-level polling averages for all @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a sweep on Tuesday .
In particular , Florida is expected to be a strong state for the former vice president .
Before Ohio ’ s postponement , Harry Enten , a senior politics analyst for CNN with a focus on polling , projected that Biden could net around 200 delegates across the four states on Tuesday .
A win of that magnitude would severely imperil Sanders ’ s chances for the nomination .
Follow along below for Vox ’ s coverage of the March 17 primaries , including live results , breaking @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .

Joe Biden is hoping to strengthen his delegate lead as voters in three states go to the polls on Tuesday.
A big night in the Democratic presidential primary will take place this Tuesday, March 17 — but not as large as was planned.
Three states — Arizona, Florida, and Illinois — will hold their primaries then; until this week, Ohio was set to join them, but Gov. Mike DeWine announced late on Monday that the state would delay in-person voting over the coronavirus outbreak.
March 17 is still one of the biggest delegate-awarding days of the primary calendar, behind Super Tuesday and a still-to-come slew of Eastern seaboard primaries on April 28. Florida has the most delegates on offer Tuesday, with 219.
Voters in those states will be confronted with a much-reduced presidential field when they head to the polls: Only former Vice President Joe Biden and Sen. Bernie Sanders are still in the running for the nomination, though Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, with two delegates, is technically still in the race.
Biden leads in the FiveThirtyEight state-level polling averages for all four states and is expected to claim a sweep on Tuesday. In particular, Florida is expected to be a strong state for the former vice president.
Before Ohio’s postponement, Harry Enten, a senior politics analyst for CNN with a focus on polling, projected that Biden could net around 200 delegates across the four states on Tuesday. A win of that magnitude would severely imperil Sanders’s chances for the nomination.
Follow along below for Vox’s coverage of the March 17 primaries, including live results, breaking news updates, analysis, and more.