[Congressional Record Volume 166, Number 36 (Monday, February 24, 2020)]
[Senate]
[Pages S1102-S1103]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]



                              Coronavirus

  Mr. SCHUMER. Mr. President, well, the World Health Organization has 
now reported that there are 79,000 cases of coronavirus across at least 
30 countries, with at least 53 confirmed cases here in United States.
  As the virus continues to spread, the global economy is already 
beginning to suffer. All of the warning lights are flashing bright red. 
We are staring down a potential pandemic, and the administration has no 
plan. We have a crisis of coronavirus, and President Trump has no plan, 
no urgency, no understanding of the facts or how to coordinate a 
response.
  We must get a handle on the coronavirus and make sure the United 
States is fully prepared to deal with its potentially far-reaching 
consequences, but the Trump administration has been asleep at the 
wheel.
  President Trump, good morning. There is a pandemic of coronavirus. 
Where are you? Where is your plan?
  It is just amazing. As the crisis grows and grows, we hear nothing.
  Coronavirus testing kits have not been widely distributed to our 
hospitals and public health labs.
  President Trump's State Department overruled the recommendations of 
the scientists in the CDC and allowed infected passengers from a cruise 
ship to be flown back into the United States.
  Amazingly, at a time when we know that these pandemics can spread, 
this administration cut the CDC--the agency in charge of fighting these 
global viruses--with a 16-percent senseless cut to its budget.
  My fellow Americans, that is what they do on all these things. They 
just cut, and then the President tries to claim credit after we restore 
the money. He did it in his State of the Union. He was claiming, 
because of his great work with NIH, we are curing cancer. He has cut 
the NIH every budget, including this one.
  It is a disgrace how this man can say one thing and do another and 
confounding that it doesn't catch up with him with too many Americans 
and none of my colleagues on this side of the aisle, and it is 
probably, right now, most dangerous and most egregious when it comes to 
coronavirus.
  It wasn't just that the President cut CDC last year. It follows years 
of drastic cuts to the global health division at CDC by the Trump 
administration.
  In 2018, CDC was forced to reduce the numbers of countries it 
operated in from 49 to 10. That is how bad it is.
  We have crises, and we have a world that is different, and this 
administration, instead of stepping up to the plate, runs away, 
listening to the clarion call of the far right: Just cut, cut, cut, 
cut, cut, no matter how it affects people.
  In 2018, even worse, President Trump ordered the National Security 
Council to scupper its entire global health security unit and asked the 
Department of Homeland Security to do the same. We don't have epidemic 
teams in the National Security Council or DHS.
  I hope and pray to God that corona doesn't spread here, but if it 
does, we have been inadequately prepared because of President Trump's 
lack of leadership, lack of understanding science, lack of ability to 
listen to experts and do something about them instead of being 
concerned--it seems all the time--with his own ego.
  The President has not even taken the simple, sensible step of 
designating a single official to lead response efforts.
  In 2014, President Obama made the smart decision to appoint Ron Klain 
to lead an interagency response to the Ebola outbreak. But President 
Trump, in contrast, has hollowed out so many agencies that one of the 
key figures responding to coronavirus is Ken Cuccinelli, an immigrant 
hard-liner with no experience in public health. Unbelievable. A man 
totally unprepared for coronavirus, an ideologue--a rightwing, nasty 
ideologue who has spent his career kicking around immigrants--is now in 
charge of our fight against coronavirus. This is after the President 
cut CDC, eliminated the global health security units in Homeland 
Security and at the NSC, and we are in trouble.
  President Trump has not only failed to marshal a capable domestic 
response to the coronavirus; he has been slow to take action to 
confront the virus abroad. We all know that the best thing to do is to 
stop it from spreading abroad before it spreads to these United States.
  Of course, the President--ego above anything else--has been afraid to 
criticize President Xi or the Communist

[[Page S1103]]

Party of China for silencing dissent and obscuring the truth about the 
coronavirus--where it originated. When China obscures the truth, it 
puts Americans in danger. Where is President Trump's voice?
  The videos emerging from behind the Chinese Communist Party's 
internet wall show Chinese people pleading--pleading--with the 
international community to expose the scope and scale of this epidemic.
  The response so far by the Trump administration is exactly what 
happens when science skeptics with alternate facts try to run emergency 
response that requires expertise, planning, knowledge, money, 
cooperation, and science-based actions.
  But being anti-science is not just rhetoric. It hurts us. It hurts 
every American in many ways, and that is what President Trump and his 
administration do, and our Republican colleagues just blithely go 
along.
  After months of tiptoeing around the Chinese Communist Party, after 3 
years of cutting funding for our epidemic response programs, President 
Trump simply has left the United States unprepared to confront a 
possible epidemic like corona.
  I will have more to say this week about what the administration must 
do to right the ship.