WASHINGTON — The Republican chairman of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions said Thursday that for all the efforts the US made in readying itself for a pandemic, ultimately the country was not adequately prepared for the coronavirus crisis.
“We’re not as prepared as we should have been,” Sen. Lamar Alexander from Tennessee told CNN’s Dana Bash on The Daily DC podcast, when asked about his reflections on how Congress and the country responded to the outbreak earlier this year.
Alexander, who’s retiring at the end of his term in January, told CNN that he’s considering different ways to be prepared for Covid-19 should it rebound in the fall “or for the next virus, which is surely coming.”
“We need to do it this year while the iron’s hot, while this is on our mind,” he said.
Since the first case was reported in late January, Covid-19 has spread to every state and the current number of cases stands at over 1.2 million cases.
The committee that Alexander chairs plans to hold a May 12 hearing on the federal government’s response to the virus and has requested Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert, as a witness.
The White House had blocked Fauci from testifying before the Democratic-led House this week, with Trump later arguing that allowing Fauci to appear before the House would be a “set up.”
Alexander dismissed any suggestion from critics that his committee would go easy on Fauci, who’s a member of the White House’s coronavirus task force.
“People know me better than that,” he said. “Look, I will ask the questions I need to ask. But remember, about half of our members are Democrats and they get to ask questions, too. So I would not say a committee that includes (Sens.) Patty Murray, Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders is a committee that’s going to go easy. “
The hearing comes as the White House coronavirus task force has begun scaling back its meetings and the President said Wednesday he would shift the team’s focus to treatment and vaccine efforts.
Alexander told Bash that “it’s probably a good idea to get rid of the task force,” arguing that the hours spent at meetings and press briefings is time “taken away from the job.”
“I think it’s probably a good idea to let the people in charge of the agencies go back to running the agencies that the President, the vice president, resume their roles, and let the task force meet on call or as it needs to,” he said.
While the President has been pushing for the country to return to normalcy, Alexander has aligned himself with public health officials in urging caution in rapidly reopening America before testing is widely available.
CNN reported Thursday that the Trump administration doesn’t plan to implement the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s draft recommendations for reopening America. The guidance provided more detailed suggestions beyond the reopening guidelines the administration had released last month, including specific suggestions for schools and churches.
“Well, I don’t know why it shouldn’t be released,” Alexander said. “I don’t know anything about it. Tell you the truth. I’ll check into that. But generally, I favor if there’s some good reason for it, I’d like to know what it is. Otherwise, it ought to be released.”
Meanwhile, Congress is negotiating a fourth stimulus package to provide economic relief in response to coronavirus. Democrats have pushed for more funding for states and local governments, but Alexander, like many within his party, feel that Congress should hold off from doling out more money.
“We ought to take $150 billion dollars we’ve already given to states and cities and give the states and cities more flexibility in the spending of that,” he told Bash, adding, “We ought to start with that and then we ought to see what else needs to be done.”
The Tennessee Republican also suggested that his home state, which is facing a billion-dollar budget shortfall, should “cut expenses and raise taxes if it needs to do.”
With the Senate back in town this week, Alexander had previously called for expanded testing for lawmakers to protect the people they might infect — particularly before they return back to their states.
Despite this, the senator told Bash that he feels safe in the US Capitol.
“Most everyone I see is wearing a mask, maybe, maybe some were not,” he said. “I know that senators, even when we see each other, we stay six feet apart. We’re practicing, by and large, the protocols.”
