WASHINGTON—U.S. Senator Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), the top Democrat on the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee on Near East, South Asia, Central Asia, and Counterterrorism, joined Deep State Radio podcast with David Rothkopf, Just Security’s Ryan Goodman and Council on Foreign Relation’s Laurie Garrett last week to discuss the geopolitical implications of the Trump administration’s handling of the COVID-19 crisis, the importance of Inspectors General in maintaining oversight over the administration’s COVID-19 response, and how Congress can craft meaningful legislation to deal with the public health crisis.

Last week, Murphy announced bipartisan legislation to reaffirm U.S. commitment to global health security, and reorient the United States’ global pandemic response amid the COVID-19 pandemic as well as legislation aimed to increase independence of inspectors general following the firing of the Inspector General tasked with oversight of COVID-19 economic relief funds. Murphy also authored an op-ed in Foreign Policy about why the United States was virtually impotent from stopping COVID-19 from reaching our shores and what can be done better if and when the next pandemic strikes.

On the Trump administration gutting of international preparedness infrastructure, Murphy said: “The Trump administration, you know, clearly has taken down many of the defenses directed by prior presidents to potential pandemics. He defunded the Predict Program, which put American scientists out all around the world picking up viruses and pathogens so that we could study them early. He stopped funding a global public health security program that had been initially funded out of the Ebola dollars, that was helping to stand up countries’ local defenses so that the disease wouldn't become such a big problem in their nation that it would reach our shores. And then, you know, he just by and large walked away from the NSC process and dismantled the specific global health security capacity in the NSC. But the NSC really exists to be able to do longer term planning, to be able to think about threats that aren't in the headlines, and the President is, you know, had mostly disdain for the NSC – cycling through advisor after advisor – and that left us vulnerable.”

Murphy continued: “No president has taken global public health seriously enough that even if President Trump had continued all of the programs that were in place in 2016, we were still inadequately resourced. I mean, going into 2017, we were spending about $6 billion on non-AIDS global public health security, and we spend about another $6 billion on PEPFAR and related programs. Compare that to 650 to 750 billion dollars on tanks and planes and aircraft carriers and guns for the military.”

On the role of inspectors generals inside the administration, Murphy said: “This president and many, many Republican senators and congressmen truly do believe that the president's agenda is being obstructed on a daily and hourly basis by a cadre of civil servants that are out to destroy the president. And this is a philosophy that is not fringe. It is very much mainstream in the Republican Party right now. And these inspectors general are, in many ways to Republicans in the Trump White House, the most visible part of the deep state, the point of the spear. And so they are using this crisis, as America's focused on getting rid of Coronavirus, as the excuse to try to do a sweep of inspectors general out of office and put Trump acolytes in their place. I'm glad that there was a letter sent asking about the firing of Inspector General Atkinson, but it was just a letter. Republicans are pretty good at sending letters every now and again. They're not so interested in actually providing a statutory check on the president, which is to state, the legislation I’m drafting which would give inspectors general seven year terms.”

On meaningful legislation that can come out of the COVID-19 crisis: “There won't be an imperative from the American public to fix what went wrong. And my argument that I make in that foreign policy pitch David directly referenced is that we need to start now, because the next pathogen, the next virus, isn't going to wait for us. And so we need to start the work of rebuilding that international anti-pandemic infrastructure today. But I do think the American public is going to demand this. I mean, the pain that is going to be wrought on this country, that is being wrought as we speak, not just in terms of the 10s of thousands of people who will die and the grief and trauma that ripples forth from that. But from an economy in which we might be sitting on 15 to 20%. unemployment, is going to result in the electorate demanding change. So I guess I'm not as worried about the sort of same cycle of headlines and then sort of disappearing imperative happening in the wake of coronavirus.”

Click here to listen to the podcast in its entirety.

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