a great machine for america

“I think it caught everyone off guard the degree to which the federal government and president were not taking ownership of the pandemic”[1]

Nine out of ten Americans are counting on their government to respond to disasters in their communities[2]. They believe that, when everybody else runs away from the chaos, government must run at it. It should be ultimately responsible and accountable for what gets done and doesn’t get done. That is the end of the story. Except when it isn’t.

In my book, Moment of Truth[3], I argue that, contrary to popular myth, there is no national disaster system in the United States. The reason for this unhappy state of affairs is that nobody wants to be responsible for saving us from a devastating catastrophe. We, the nation and the world, have seen the consequences of this critical preparedness gap play out over the past ten months. 

In the early days of the crisis, we watched as the Federal Emergency Management Agency worked to distance itself from it. Agency officials testified before Congress that they didn’t know what anybody else was doing before it took over the country’s fractured coronavirus response on March 18th. Since that time, the President has worked hard to shield himself from ownership [4] by repeatedly asserting that his federal bureaucracy is doing a good job.

This absence of ownership is the root cause of our national failure. Because the White House didn’t own it, we didn’t activate in time and we haven’t executed effectively. Thankfully, all of this looks likely to change.

Now comes the tricky part. President-elect Biden on Monday named a task force of public health and science experts to develop a blueprint for fighting the coronavirus. This is a good start, but we have seen this movie before, and we know that these kind of high-level committees are not nearly enough. The president will need dozens, if not hundreds, of task forces to confront the massive challenges we face.

These should be diverse teams of subject matter experts, practitioners and citizens working locally and regionally on a multitude of issues, from drive-through testing sites to culturally competent contact tracing to delivering vaccine to the racial and ethnic minorities who have been disproportionately affected by this disease. The reality is that states and locals have been doing this since the early days of the crisis and many, if not most, of these task forces already exist. Now we need the federal government to take it from the top with a coordinated effort that spans the nation.

Except that, unlike their counterparts at the state and local level, federal agencies rarely engage actual citizens. A strong “don’t go native” culture permeates the vast federal bureaucracy. This is a big problem during major disaster responses and we have experienced many of its bad outcomes during past disasters in New York City. Overcoming this federal agency “TeflonTM“ is a tough challenge but now, at long last, it must be done.

Federal ownership starts with connecting together a national team of teams. Emergency managers call this the “incident organization” but, after leading incident organizations during dozens of disasters from blizzards to blackouts to H1N1, I call them “Great Machines”. Centered on our Emergency Operations Centers, the Great Machine is founded on the concept of transparency. It brings teams working in separate silos together around the same mission, to work collaboratively and to innovate. Through this team of teams the President can work across states and communities to reach down into our homes and our businesses to get things done.

The Great Machine is an ownership structure for the response. It assures us that someone is in charge by telling everybody what is going on: from the nurse on the patient floor to the senior who feels trapped in their own home. The Great Machine creates trust—trust in the plan and confidence that we will not fail. It doesn’t wait; it anticipates. It creates a collective dynamic that empowers teams to run at, not away from, problems.

People think that government has some innate ability to respond to disasters. Nothing could be further from the truth. Governments are slow-moving creatures of habit, ill-suited to the demands of catastrophes. The Great Machine is the secret sauce, an instant bureaucracy that supercharges the government-led response.

Within every crisis are the seeds of opportunity. We have the system, the technology and the teams. We just need the collective will to bring it together. And this structure, this Great Machine, that we must create in the midst of the crisis, will long endure so that we may confront the even greater challenges that lie ahead.

Kelly R McKinney is the AVP, Emergency Management + Enterprise Resilience at NYU Langone Health in New York City. The former Deputy Commissioner at the New York City Office of Emergency Management and Chief Disaster Officer at the American Red Cross in Greater New York, he is the author of “Moment of Truth: The Nature of Catastrophes and How to Prepare for Them” published by Post Hill Press.

[1] https://www.jsonline.com/in-depth/news/2020/10/14/america-had-worlds-best-pandemic-response-plan-playbook-why-did-fail-coronavirus-covid-19-timeline/3587922001/

[2] Carroll Doherty, Jocelyn Kiley and Olivia O’Hea, “Government Gets Lower Ratings for Handling Health Care, Environment, Disaster Response, Low Trust in Federal Government Among Members of Both Parties,” Pew Research Center, 14 December 2017, https://www.people-press.org/2017/12/14/government-gets-lower-ratings-for-handling-health-care-environment-disaster-response/2/

[3] McKinney, Kelly. Moment of Truth: the Nature of Catastrophes and How to Prepare for Them. Savio Republic, 2018

[4] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/18/us/politics/trump-coronavirus-response-failure-leadership.html