President Donald Trump, in a roller-coaster week of reversals and contradictions, told governors to “call your own shots” on lifting stay-at-home orders once the coronavirus threat subsides. But then he took to Twitter to push some to reopen their economies quickly and tell them it was their job to ramp up testing.
“This is mayhem,” New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo said Friday. “We need a coordinated approach between the federal government and the states.”
In the absence of one, Cuomo and sixteen other governors representing half the nation’s population have organized three separate clusters of states each committed to working together on the details of relaunching businesses, schools and events while avoiding a resurgence of infections.
The pacts have formed among states mostly with Democratic governors on the West Coast, around the Great Lakes and in the densely populated Northeast, covering several big metropolitan areas that cross state lines, including New York, Chicago and Philadelphia.
With commuters using interconnected trains in the Northeast and family connections, vacation travel and tech hubs linking the West Coast states, California Gov. Gavin Newsom says the teamwork recognizes “that this pandemic virus knows no boundaries, knows no borders, you can’t build walls around it and you can’t deny basic fundamental facts.”
Others are going their own way, including the second most populous state — Texas — where Gov. Greg Abbott said Friday that he would ease some pandemic-related restrictions next week. Florida, another state with a huge population, is also not in an alliance.
California, Oregon and Washington have teamed up, and pacts have formed among Connecticut, Delaware, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania and Rhode Island as well as Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio and Wisconsin.
Their efforts are starting in the shadows of high-profile disputes between some governors and Trump, whose message has changed frequently during the pandemic. The partnerships were announced as Trump asserted “total authority” over when states lift restrictions.
He then deferred to governors as he issued broad guidelines for reopening economies over time in places with extensive testing and decreasing cases of the virus. But by Friday, he was tweeting support for those protesting stay-at-home orders in Michigan, Minnesota and Virginia and arguing that “States have to step up their TESTING!”
Republican and Democratic governors said they would be cautious on reopening and warned they won’t be able to expand testing without help from the Trump administration.
Addisu Demissie, a Democratic strategist who managed Newsom’s 2018 campaign, said the alliances are “largely an acknowledgement that the federal government is not going to get done what the states need to get done.”
Richard Besser, a former interim director of the U.S. Centers on Disease Control and Prevention, said the federal guidelines had many good points. But “there are some other components that aren’t there, such as the availability of widespread testing capacity,” said Besser, CEO of the health-focused nonprofit the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and a New Jersey representative in the Northeast partnership.
David Postman, chief of staff for Washington Gov. Jay Inslee, said cooperating with California and Oregon — which also coordinate during wildfire season — would probably happen regardless of the Trump administration’s approach.
“It just seemed that working together more closely would be more helpful to us,” he said.
