When Crisis Planning Doesn't Work

As t he 2020 coronavirus pandemic unfolds, many Americans have asked why the government didn’t seem to have a plan for this crisis—a crisis that was both predictable and predicted. Almost no one remembers that six months before the current outbreak, Congress passed the Pandemic and All-Hazards Preparedness Act of 2019, which offered funds and planning authority for just such a crisis. It was the latest in a series of at least a half-dozen similar acts passed over the last two decades.

The problem isn’t that the U.S. government lacked a plan for an international pandemic. It’s that the government had dozens of such plans, totaling thousands of pages, issued by different agencies and different presidential administrations, with little thought to how they would be combined or who would implement them. To meet the next crisis more effectively, we need to get over our obsession with “planning.” Each crisis brings its own challenges, and we must meet those challenges accordingly. Read Full Article »