When people ask me why New York was so much more advanced than any other state in its fight against the virus, my answer is simple. Besides the advantage of 19.5 million New Yorkers who were New York tough, no other state government had the talent that we had. My team is in many ways more talented than I am. I enjoy surrounding myself with people who are smarter and better than I am. Some people get defensive when the people around them are stronger and smarter. I don’t. I know my limitations and they are many. I know what I do well and I know my weaknesses. I want people on my team who complement one another and me. Melissa, Rob, and Stephanie really manage the whole operation. It gives me the freedom to focus on what I need to do without sacrificing a beat.
The juxtaposition between my team and the White House operation could not be more stark. To further compound the federal incompetence, FEMA and the White House refused to honor an agreement made by the president himself. The customary arrangement is that a state reimburses FEMA for 25 percent of the total cost incurred by FEMA in assisting a state during an emergency. This 25 percent state allocation can be waived by the federal government, and it often is.
When we were at the White House on April 21, I was on my way out of the West Wing when I ran into Secretary of the Treasury Steve Mnuchin. Secretary Mnuchin is a New Yorker, and I had known him tangentially. As we were standing in the hallway near the Roosevelt Room, Mnuchin informed me that they were considering waiving the requirement that New York State pay the 25 percent share of the FEMA cost. This was a positive gesture by the federal government and was surely warranted, because New York had paid a much higher cost for the COVID virus than any other state.
“I just need the president to sign off,” he said.
Jared Kushner was nearby, and Mnuchin suggested that we go back into the Oval Office to get the president’s sign-off, which we did. They called the president back into the Oval Office to meet with us; Mnuchin explained the situation, and the president authorized the waiver. Secretary Mnuchin estimated this would save New York State approximately $300 million. The president told me that I should announce it publicly. We left the White House, went to the airport, and flew back to New York. I was grateful for the assistance. It didn’t make any sense that the state that endured the most pain and death had to pay because it endured the most pain and death. The reprieve made my trip worthwhile, and we agreed that we would publicly announce it immediately. That evening I did my briefing and among other news thanked the president for the waiver and the $300 million in savings for New York.
Several weeks later, I was in Albany when Robert Mujica, the budget director, came in with the FEMA agreement, which was requiring that we pay the 25 percent match. I told him it was a mistake and that he should contact FEMA. Several days later he came back and said that FEMA refused to waive the 25 percent. I called the FEMA administrator, Peter Gaynor, and he said he had no knowledge of the 25 percent waiver. I asked Gaynor if the president was authorized to make such decisions—because he had. I told Gaynor that when I was a cabinet secretary, the president did have authority to make such decisions and that the president’s decisions usually mattered. I suggested Gaynor call the president and call me back. I told him if he wanted more information, he could google it by punching in “Trump Cuomo FEMA.” I never heard back from Gaynor.
I then called the White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows, and told him of the disconnect, and he said he would look into it. To this day, FEMA has refused to grant a waiver that the president agreed to. How do I explain it? I can’t. It is either a level of operational incompetence beyond my imagination or just more smoke and mirrors. The White House wanted positive publicity for helping New York, and they received it when I made the announcement in my briefing, but there was no incentive to follow through. Jim Malatras was right: It was all a scene from a reality TV show. In any case, to me it was the perfect metaphor of the federal government’s role in this crisis.
APRIL 22 | 5,526 NEW CASES | 15,599 HOSPITALIZED | 474 DEATHS
“Make no mistake, this is a profound moment in history.”
GREAT PROFESSIONALS HAVE DEDICATED THEIR lives to the field of public health. And there are great institutions dedicated to educating the field. However, it shocked me to see how little public health operational capacity we actually have. I hope the COVID crisis will turn what has been a largely academic field into an operationally oriented profession to the scale necessary. Public health threats are no longer theoretical; they now exist in the real and practical world.
The systems we had to design on a moment’s notice must now be institutionalized. Beth Garvey, my special counsel, and I spent hours writing the state manual on quarantine back in March. Now what I call the T&T twins—testing and tracing—must be studied and implemented. Our initial scramble was to assemble the testing programs, but the tracing operation is what makes the testing work to reduce the viral transmission rate. The concept is to debrief individuals who test positive to find out whom they have been in contact with in order to find out whom they might have infected. They call tracers “disease detectives.” The function predates COVID; they were used in previous outbreaks such as Ebola. The CDC has an entire division of dedicated
