President Donald Trump, against the strong advice of his own public health experts arguing for continued restrictions on businesses and people amid the growing coronavirus outbreak, has been increasing vocal about relaxing those strictures.
“Our country was not built to be shut down," the president said Monday. “We are going to be opening up our country for business because our country was meant to be open.”
But New Jersey officials, who have imposed increasingly tough rules on businesses, workers, and even wedding and funerals, show no signs of following Trump’s lead, as the death toll from COVID-19 continues to climb in the state and across the country.
The president’s ability to actually lift restrictions is limited to federal institutions, legal experts say. Still, his power to control hundreds of billions upon billions in emergency aid could serve as a powerful cudgel to force the issue, they note.
Gov. Phil Murphy, a Democrat who has been in talks with Trump, a Republican, in an effort to score additional federal aid for his hard-hit state as the U.S.Senate and White House agreed to a $2 trillion stimulus deal early Wednesday, would not directly respond to questions about what the state would do if the president acted to ease restrictions put in place in response to cut infection rates and lessen the death toll.
“The president’s got the biggest bully pulpit in the world and if the president of the United States says ‘X,’ it has a huge impact,” Murphy said during a press briefing Tuesday. “To the best of my knowledge, other than exercising the federal purse strings, that does not necessarily translate to direct action.”
Noting that Trump has said he doesn’t want the cure to be worse than the disease, Murphy said nobody does.
“But I do think there is a responsible way to go about that,” the governor said, pointing to the massive federal aid package that would set aside billions for direct payments to individuals and families, small business loans, unemployment insurance benefits and loans for distressed companies, calling it a “massive jolt” to the economy.
Health experts in New Jersey and elsewhere maintain that the country must continue to dramatically limit social interaction, as well as shutting down non-essential businesses. Unless that continues, they fear the number of infections will overwhelm the health care system, as it has in parts of Italy, leading to many more deaths.
Trump, though, has made it clear he wants to move beyond the advisories that have sidelined workers, shut down schools and universities — even his own golf club in Bedminster — and has led to a widespread economic slowdown that has battered on Wall Street.
“I would love to have the country opened up and just raring to go by Easter," he said during a Fox News virtual town hall.
Easter, on April 12, is just over two weeks away.
Trump likely does not have the power, however, to actually lift state quarantines, said Elie Honig, Executive Director of the Rutgers Institute for Secure Communities. All governors have the authority to order quarantines in a health emergency. But while the federal government can supersede state law in imposing its own quarantine orders, Honig said it cannot “un-quarantine” those already subject to a state order.
How the nation deals with disasters such as the coronavirus outbreak is grounded in the idea that the response to most emergencies will have a local focus — whether that be from terrorist attacks like 9/11, major catastrophes like Katrina or wildfires in California, noted John Farmer, who led the 9/11 Commission team that focused on emergency response and emergency preparedness.
The former state attorney general, who currently serves as the director of the Eagleton Institute at Rutgers University, said the prevailing model is that states and their governors take the lead in critical decision-making. The federal government’s role typically is to have the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, and other federal departments providing material assistance and expertise when needed.
“The very nature of pandemics, however, is their lack of respect for political boundaries. COVID-19 is therefore in some sense a smart bomb aimed at our emergency response infrastructure,” Farmer said. “It's no wonder that states have been competing against each other to secure needed supplies; a greater degree of centralized coordination seems imperative.”
But he said the question raised by the President's recent remarks as to whether the federal government can force states back to "normalcy" when public health experts and the leaders of those states believe that such a move endangers public health, turns on how dependent the states will be on the provision of federal resources.
Basically it could be a question of how far the administration will be willing to go to condition the provision of any assistance, Farmer suggested, pointing to any aid earmarked for New Jersey that could be conditioned on the state’s compliance with the administration’s strategy.
Murphy, pressed on the president’s comments, said that given the enormity of the impact on the economy, he could understand those who want to find “as fast and short a road to normalcy” as possible.
“I get that completely,” Murphy said. “But we’ve got to do it responsibly, and I don’t think anyone is suggesting anything otherwise. We’re not there yet. We have to stay the course.”
NJ Advance Media staff writer Brent Johnson contributed to this report.
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The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Ted Sherman may be reached at tsherman@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @TedShermanSL. Facebook: @TedSherman.reporter. Find NJ.com on Facebook.
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