New York City’s Department of Sanitation, which has a very important job (that it has traditionally managed to do fairly well), is funded through the municipal budget, which nearly always shrinks in a crisis. The governor had a wing of the armed forces at his disposal, paid for (for the most part) by the money-printing, deficit-spending federal government. If we agree that the state is responsible for picking up the trash, and the department assigned that responsibility is deprived of the resources necessary to perform that function, then, yes, sure, send in the arm of the state that is, in the United States, traditionally completely immune from austerian pressures to do it, instead. It may be demeaning to the National Guard’s officers and a poor use of resources, but this is how we’ve decided to organize our society.
For almost a year now, the federal government has been picking up all or most of the tab for states to deploy the National Guard to respond to the Covid-19 pandemic. Upon taking office, President Joe Biden quickly signed an executive order fully federalizing the cost of pandemic-related National Guard deployments. Now the National Guard is posted just a short walk away from where I write this, distributing and even administering Covid-19 vaccines at one of a few mass vaccination sites that have been set up around New York City and state. Active-duty military personnel have been deployed to federal vaccination sites across the country, with more troops on the way this month.
It’s not entirely clear why this is the military’s responsibility. America is a rich nation with a robust public and private health infrastructure. We might have chosen, at some point, to create a reserve force of doctors and nurses who could be called up to help administer a national vaccine program. (The Affordable Care Act was actually supposed to create such a force: a “Ready Reserve” corps of the U.S. Public Health Service’s Commissioned Corps that could be called up in emergencies. It just didn’t happen, because Congress forgot to include a way to pay the physicians, nurses, pharmacists, and other medical professionals that would serve in that reserve corps. Congress only got around to fixing the problem last year, midway through the pandemic.) Or we even could have tried building public health systems capable of doing a mass vaccination campaign without the need for a uniformed service at all. Israel’s lauded vaccine rollout depended on its network of community health organizations. The United Kingdom, relying on its National Health Service, is outpacing the rest of Europe in vaccine delivery. But we don’t have a national health care system. We have the National Guard and the Defense Department.
To determine how the military ended up so central to our vaccine distribution plan, it helps juxtapose two seemingly unrelated facts: Last week, the Biden administration carried out airstrikes in Syria without congressional approval, and the White House announced that the vice president would not overrule a hired parliamentarian’s determination that a $15 federal minimum wage could not be included in the Covid-19 relief package currently moving through Congress.
In making her decision, the parliamentarian apparently considered the fact that the Congressional Budget Office had previously determined that raising the minimum wage would increase the federal budget deficit by $54 billion. The CBO did not score the airstrikes.
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