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Hours after President Donald Trump tweeted Monday that he alone, not the governors, has the power to reopen the economy, seven state executives, including New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo—who’s become a national figure in the pandemic—announced a joint council to get people back to work.
“Everyone is very anxious to get out of the house, get back to work, get the economy moving. Everyone agrees with that,” Cuomo said during a joint news conference with governors from Connecticut, New Jersey, Rhode Island, Pennsylvania and Delaware. Massachusetts will also join, it was later announced.
The governors’ appointees will form the initial council that will devise, in the next few weeks, an integrated plan for how to get the strip of the Eastern U.S. back up and running without triggering a second outbreak of the disease, they said.
“What the art form is going to be here is doing that smartly and doing that productively and doing that in a coordinated way, doing that in coordination with the other states that are in the area,” Cuomo said on Monday.
Each state is providing three members each to the panel: a leading health expert, an economic development expert and a chief of staff for each governor. The 21-member group will convene for the first time on Tuesday to chart a way forward that equally addresses the public health and the economic sides of the crisis, Cuomo said.
“You need the best public health plan and you need the best economic reactivation plan,” he said. “It’s not either or, it has to be both. No one is willing to sacrifice one at the expense of the other.”
New York City and Philadelphia are deeply intertwined with commuters and businesses from neighboring states. Before the coronavirus forced people to stay home, hundreds of thousands of workers flooded into Manhattan every weekday from New Jersey and Connecticut.
The ties between states is also clear in the pattern of the virus outbreak, which in Connecticut is concentrated along Interstate 95, which many commuters take to get to work in New York City.
“It is the commuter corridor for us, but it’s also the COVID corridor, which is why it’s so important we work together thoughtfully on this,” said Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont.
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Lifting stay-at-home orders in a hasty or poorly coordinated manner could spell a second wave of outbreak akin to what Japan, Hong Kong and Singapore have reported, Lamont said. “That would be so demoralizing for our economy.”
One important piece of the puzzle will be deciding when to reopen schools, a prerequisite for any broad reopening of the economy, Cuomo said. Statewide, New York schools are closed at least until April 29.
The governors don’t expect a single strategy will be implemented the same way at the same time across all states or even across all jurisdictions, citing the different disease trajectories for each area. Data suggests New York City, for instance, has reached a plateau in its crushing outbreak, whereas hospitalizations and other key indicators are still rising in New Jersey, said New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy. “Our positive tests have begun to flatten, but we’re not yet there,” he said.
The unprecedented coordination among state executives came the same day Trump said the federal government alone had the power to open up the economy.
“For the purpose of creating conflict and confusion, some in the Fake News Media are saying that it is the Governors’ decision to open up the states, not that of the President of the United States & the Federal Government,” Trump tweeted Monday morning. “Let it be fully understood that this is incorrect.”
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Trump said that while he’s working in conjunction with the governors on restarting the economy, “it is the decision of the President, and for many good reasons.”
His comment appeared to fall on deaf ears, however, as later that day West Coast states laid out a similar joint effort to restart their economies, governors from California, Washington and Oregon announced.
So much was left up to governors since the beginning, so it only makes sense for states to handle this as well, said Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf during the joint briefing with Cuomo.
“Seeing as we had the responsibility to close the states down, we have the responsibility to open them back up. We’ve got to do both,” Wolf said.
Cuomo said Trump had the authority as president during a national emergency to take on that responsibility, but said any return to work would have to be clearly defined and Trump would have to clarify the roles of governors, who’ve so far handled things like purchasing and setting rules independently.
“He left it to the states to close down,” Cuomo said. “That was a state-by-state decision and without any guidance really.
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“That was the model of management that’s been promulgated thus far. It’s still civics 101,” he said. “If you want to change the management model, you can do this, but what is the model?”
Any plan from the federal government would have to be specific and differentiate between various regions, Cuomo added. “I don’t believe they could have a policy that says you can open businesses five days from now.”
