Predictable Crises The Federal System Repeatedly Fails To Anticipate.

The COVID-19 pandemic killed more than a million Americans and exposed every weakness in the public-health infrastructure: data systems that did not interoperate, supply chains that depended on adversaries, surveillance that detected outbreaks weeks late, and a vaccine pipeline that worked through extraordinary measures rather than as a system. The proposals here address what would have to be true for the next pandemic to be smaller, not larger — and extend the same logic to the other predictable crises the federal system repeatedly fails to anticipate: a flood insurance program that cannot price its own risk, and a federal disaster declaration framework that has not been seriously updated since the storms it was written for were a fraction of the scale of those it now responds to.