Can the U.S. Government Survive the Next Disaster?

As the coronavirus pandemic continues, Bloomberg Opinion will be running features that consider the long-term consequences of the crisis. This column is part of a package on politics and government. For more, see Clive Crook on rethinking resilience, Mihir Sharma on the global failure to protect migrant workers and Andreas Kluth on the future of the European Union.

Among the many political shortcomings that the pandemic has laid bare is that the U.S. suffers from constitutional and statutory gaps that make its democracy, and even its basic governing ability, vulnerable in an emergency. The good news? The hard thinking about this problem has mostly already been done. The bad news? No one who can do anything about it seems to care — and the incentives for undertaking the needed reforms are slim indeed.

The last time the U.S. perceived a major threat to the functioning of the republic was after the Sept. 11 attacks. It didn’t take much to realize that the nation was vulnerable; in fact, the post-9/11 culture rapidly produced fictional scenarios in which some obscure cabinet secretary ended up in the Oval Office after a crisis, or devious politicians manipulated the existing and poorly designed order of presidential succession. If people cared more about Congress, there would’ve been just as many doomsday stories centered on the legislature, which is similarly ill-prepared.