Three Great DC Scandals Not Getting Enough Attention

Even DC's Most Cynical Find These to Be Shocking

I’ve lived and worked in Washington for over 30 years. I’m hard to shock.

Even many “scandals”—big ones—here do not surprise me.

In fact, scandals in Washington are not, simply because they reveal corruption or crimes or patterns of unethical or immoral or illegal or dangerous behavior, shocking. In fact, some—like the corruption of the NRA or Big Pharma or other special interests buying support on Capitol Hill are completely unsurprising.  So are, sadly, tax and regulatory cuts that benefit the rich. They are the way the city and our “money is speech” campaign finance system works each and every day.  You can also file the dumb-as-a-box-of-rocks stupidity of many members of Congress (and its regularly disturbing consequences) into this category.

Some scandals fall into a kind of middle ground between truly shocking and completely predictable. The hypocrisy of the support of Christian evangelicals for a Godless, valueless, ubercreep like Trump might fit the bill here. So, in my mind, does the back-scratching of access journalists with their sources—which ends up sacrificing good journalism on the altar of reportorial ambitions. (It happens so often it is baked in the cake. DC insiders don’t read articles so much as they decode them—looking at the by-line, looking at the sources in the story they regularly rely on, and calibrating for the agenda of source and reporter.)

Another example in this category is the business-as-usual but completely unnecessary and indefensible decision by Democratic leaders on the Hill to ok more arms sales to Israel right now. Israel has plenty of money. It doesn’t need our charity. And it is undermining our national interests and for that matter our laws using weapons we provide to continue to commit crimes against humanity in Gaza. (For more on this: https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2024/06/17/biden-israel-arms-sale-meeks/)

But every so often there are scandals that are truly mind-blowing, so hard to comprehend that even old timers and cynics are gob-smacked that they have taken place or are happening right now. I’m reminded of three related such scandals by the publication of the memoirs of Dr. Anthony Fauci, “On Call: A Doctor’s Journey in Public Service.”  (For more on this: https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2024/06/18/fauci-trump-book/?utm_campaign=wp_power_up&utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&wpisrc=nl_powerup&carta-url=https%3A%2F%2Fs2.washingtonpost.com%2Fcar-ln-tr%2F3e073ee%2F66715dfff6b25276e719f368%2F596be3f5ade4e24119bcdcbe%2F28%2F46%2F66715dfff6b25276e719f368)

According to reports, the book details Fauci’s relationship with multiple presidents over the course of his distinguished and lengthy career as one of America’s top and most visible public health officials. Naturally, much attention now is devoted to Fauci’s description of his relationship with Trump. It started out warm but turned chilly and then toxic as Fauci continued to speak the truth about the pandemic to both Trump and to the general public.

I look forward to reading the book. I’ve had some conversations with Fauci as he was contemplating writing it and then as he was preparing it. He has approached it as he has done everything in his life, thoughtfully, ethically and systematically.  And I will admit a bias here. Having spoken to him a number of times (including on a DSR Network podcast: https://thedsrnetwork.com/american-resistance-mini-series-a-conversation-with-dr-anthony-fauci as well as while doing research for my own writing and at many events in and around DC), I like and admire Fauci immensely. He is the very best of public service and of the public application of science and this country is deeply fortunate to have had him work so tirelessly on so many great health challenges for so long.

But reading the reports about the doctor’s new book have turned my mind back to COVID and how it was handled. In all my life in Washington, few events have been so dramatic, consequential or, both as they happened and in retrospect, kind of weird. Just thinking back to that time, to the fear, to the loss, to the vignettes of living as we never thought we would induces chills. I’ll never forget going out for a walk with my wife and our dog one evening in New York City and heading past the local hospital in Greenwich Village. The sun was setting. The streets were eerily empty. And the only sound you could was the compressor from the refrigerated trucks that were parked in the street outside the hospital to serve as temporary morgues because so many were dying, they hospital’s regular facilities were overflowing with victims of the disease.

Even apart from the losses, we still do not have any idea about how profoundly the pandemic has affected our lives. We view the world as more fragile, the normal order of events more disruptable than we did before. We value experience and interaction more even as we do it less, even as more of our life has become virtual. And we have been torn apart by a deep divide within our society about science and medicine that, too my mind, was unthinkable in our current era (although perhaps I should’ve known better given prevailing ignorance…much of it willful…on issues like the climate crisis.)

Stranger still to me are these scandals that I mentioned at the outset. They are profoundly important and yet receive far too little discussion. It is almost as if COVID was so traumatic we don’t want to discuss it anymore. (That was, after all, the approach President Bleach-in-your-Veins preferred taken. Fauci was advocating for science and vaccines. Trump was advocating for lies and denial.)

The first of the scandals is the one revealed by the Fauci vs. Trump rift. It is the rise of the anti-vaxxers and the metastasization of their pro-ignorance, anti-historical, anti-people, pro-superstition rhetoric and agitation into a broader anti-science movement. It’s hard for me, the son of a scientist, who had my first summer jobs at one of America’s great laboratories (Bell Labs)…who can also read…to get my mind around these views that are both so dangerous and so easily refuted.

But then again, people believe a lot of nonsense—especially if it confirms the rest of their worldview or is more comfortable for them for other reasons. So maybe I should not be surprised that despite the fact that the COVID epidemic and its management revealed yet again the power and value of scientific research and sound public health practices. In fact, I am stupefied that the entire GOP and many political parties and public officials around the world have had their views harden against vaccines and sensible policies despite the preponderance of evidence that sound science works. Although “ignorance is power” is the maxim of many pernicious political and religious movements throughout history, I can’t help but be struck that the more evidence we have that reveals the fatuousness and dangers of their positions, the more dug in they become.

But there are two other COVID-related scandals that, although impacted by the existence of the stupidity-is-bliss movement also reflect badly on folks who should know better. The first of these is that there has been no major, systematic investigation in the Congress or elsewhere into the lessons of the COVID pandemic. Over 100 million Americans have had the disease. Over 1.1 million died of it. It is still with us and we are still learning about its often devastating lasting consequences. Although estimates vary, the total economic cost of COVID to the United States is likely over $15 trillion. Possibly considerably higher than that.

Furthermore, we know that hundreds of thousands of those death were preventable, that the Trump Administration made massive errors in how it responded to the pandemic. Indeed, among the public policy failures in U.S. history, few took a higher toll. And many of the errors that were made were undertaken for cynical or even corrupt reasons. And Trump and those who support his policies are still with us, still politically relevant.

It is impossible to understand why the Democratic controlled U.S. Senate, for example, not to mention any public official who takes their oath seriously, would not have demanded a massive investigation into what happened and who was responsible.

Further, in a third COVID-related scandal that is even less discussed, a proposal that the Biden Administration developed in its very first days to set aside a fund and the other resources necessary to prepare for our next pandemic(s) was allowed to die. Officials in the White House with whom I spoke who understood the essential nature of such preparedness expressed to me deep disappointment that there was no way the Congress would support any such effort. (See scandal number one, above, for more such reasons.)

It is almost impossible to imagine a worse public policy response in the aftermath of a bigger disaster. No accountability. No investigation. No preparation based on lessons learned. The emergence of a major political movement that is effectively advocating for death and disease, for the opposite of everything reason and facts would dictate.

It’s stunning. It’s not too late of course, to reverse course on the last two matters and perhaps a Democratic win in November that returned the president to office and the control of one or both houses of Congress to the pro-science, pro-facts, pro-grip-on-reality party might allow us to revisit these needs. Certainly, I hope it will.

Because that next pandemic is out there. It may not be the bird flu that is currently in the headlines. It might even be some newly evolved strain of COVID.  But history shows it is out there and we have, in our own lives, fresh in our own memories, the images and heartbreak and suffering that come of being unprepared.

We know the huge costs that come of leaders promoting the narrative they think we prefer to hear rather than the one we need to hear. We need to hear the warnings of men like Dr. Anthony Fauci and of our own experience or we are doomed to relive the experiences of 2020-2022 yet again, perhaps very soon.