The Premonition: A Pandemic Story

by Michael Lewis

The Reagan administration must have noticed the possibility. After Foege resigned, the White House converted the position of CDC director from career civil servant to presidential appointee. Since the agency’s inception back in 1946, no one had paid much attention to the party politics of the CDC director. (“No one ever asked me,” said Foege.) Henceforth the CDC director would not bubble up from inside the CDC, lifted by the approval of his peers, but would be plucked from the supporters of whichever politician happened to occupy the White House. Foege’s replacement, James O. Mason, was an ideological soulmate and good friend of Republican senator Orrin Hatch. If somehow he still managed to displease the White House, the president could fire him on a whim, as he could not have fired David Sencer.* Henceforth the CDC director would not serve across administrations, as past directors had done, but would be replaced when the president was replaced, or usually sooner. The entire United States government had been drifting that way for some time—management jobs once done by career civil servants being turned into roles performed by people appointed by the president. One of the problems this created was management inexperience: the average tenure of the appointees fluctuated between eighteen months and two years, depending on the administration. Another was the kind of person the job now selected for. There would be exceptions, of course, but the odds favored the pleaser. The per...

From Scientists to Servants: How Politics Captured the CDC