The Opening Up America Plan Tests Positive as an Inadequate Toolkit
As the Washington Post’s Editorial Board pointed out yesterday, The Opening Up America Plan, for all its virtues, has a glaring gap: “Who will address the enormous bottleneck of diagnostic testing, which remains far below what is needed to reopen the country?” If we think of this plan as a “toolkit,” the criticism of it I think is well-founded because there is indeed a missing plank.
I believe the most effective toolkit has 3 essential elements:
Know-Why - the “burning platform” that conveys why us and why now
Know-What - the strategic choices that encapsulate what we’ve chosen to do and NOT do
Know-How - the enabling, action-oriented tools
In the case of the Opening Up America Plan, the Know-Why is pretty well articulated and embraced: We’re gradually emerging on the other side of the CV19 peak, and as a nation we’re eager to return to a thriving economy and the freedoms that have defined us.
The Know-What is also effectively documented in the plan: A thoughtful, phased approach to returning to an open economy that requires objective milestones to be met, rooted in people’s health and safety and with the premise that we’re still a long way from having an enduring treatment or vaccine solution.
It’s really the Know-How that’s sorely inadequate – more precisely it’s that we have yet to achieve an acceptable scale of diagnostic testing that would help governors know when their states have cleared the hurdles to advance to the next phase of reopening. If I were a governor I'd be irked that the federal testing plans unveiled 5 weeks ago have only achieved about 1/10 of promised targets, and frustrated that I may indeed be on my own to bootstrap a scalable testing solution for my state.
A toolkit that lacks Know-Why leads to INERTIA. That's not the issue here.
A toolkit that lacks Know-What leads to CONFUSION. Also not the issue here.
A toolkit that lacks Know-How leads to FRUSTRATION. Which seems to be the overarching sentiment since Thursday’s announcement. The Post put it well: “(The President) is pushing (governors) off in a canoe with a smile – and saying good luck finding a paddle.”