Covid-19: Regulatory Obstacles to U.S. Recovery

City Journal Audio

Manhattan Institute

Politics, News Commentary, News

4.8 • 615 Ratings

🗓️ 13 May 2020

⏱️ 27 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

James R. Copland joins Brian Anderson to discuss how America's uniquely cumbersome regulatory system impeded the national response to the Covid-19 crisis and how costly litigation could damage the economy even further.

The FDA and CDC's administrative failings in the early days of the crisis proved costly. The federal process for reviewing and approving drugs and medical devices, writes Copland, still leaves much to be desired. And a wave of coronavirus-related lawsuits poses a serious threat to future business viability.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome back to Tim Blocks. This is your host, Brian Anderson.
0:19.3	Joining us on today's show is Jim Copeland, my colleague. He's a senior fellow and director of legal policy at the Manhattan Institute, and he's a frequent contributor to City Journal. You can follow him on Twitter at James R. Copeland, and there's no E in Copeland. It's C-O-P-L-A-N-D. Jim's written three fascinating pieces for us over the last
0:41.2	several weeks, which we'll be talking about here on the podcast, on the legal and regulatory side, really,
0:48.0	of the coronavirus pandemic. His first piece, which went online in late March and is in our spring issue of the magazine,
0:57.0	is called The Real Life Costs of Bad Regulation.
1:00.9	You can find this work on the City Journal website, and we'll link to Jim's author page in the description.
1:06.7	Jim, thanks very much for coming on.
1:09.5	Thanks for having me, Brian.
1:11.8	Yeah, your first piece details some of the early administrative failings that took place at the FDA and the CDC in fighting the pandemic.
1:22.9	Could you talk a bit about some of the specific regulatory hurdles that may have delayed our response in those early days of the crisis or made it less effective?
1:32.7	Absolutely. And I think this is the story. It's somewhat told, but it's the untold story here. Everyone focuses on the political actors.
1:40.3	And of course, the president, various governors and New York, Governor Cuomo, people looking at Congress, passing more than $2 trillion of new allocations.
1:50.0	But the real critical failing in the U.S. response came at the administrative agencies and the unelected actors running those agencies.
2:03.9	And these aren't political hacks, I want to emphasize.
2:06.6	I mean, Stephen Hahn, the director of the Food and Drug Administration, the administrator,
2:13.1	is an experienced oncologist.
2:16.4	He ran MD Anderson in Houston, very experienced doctor with administrative expertise.
2:21.9	Robert Redfield, who runs the CDC, very experienced doctor, a virologist who worked on HIV
2:29.5	research.
2:30.7	So these are experts, but they made critical mistakes here. And the critical
2:36.7	mistakes were a combination of in the moment judgment and sort of bad, obsolete, regulatory
2:43.8	garbage that got in the way, none of which was really ever authorized by Congress directly,
	...

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