Middleboro Review 2: POLITICO NIGHTLY: The next Anthony Fauci

Tuesday, August 23, 2022

POLITICO NIGHTLY: The next Anthony Fauci

SUCCESSION PLAN — Fifty-four years in government — including 38 years leading the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. An adviser to seven presidents, beginning with Ronald Reagan. A Presidential Medal of Freedom recipient for his work in combating the HIV/AIDS epidemic. The face of the U.S. government’s Covid response.

We might never see the likes of Anthony Fauci again, and not just because of his standout accomplishments. The departure of Fauci, who announced today he’s stepping down in December from his three jobs as NIAID director, chief medical adviser to President Joe Biden and lead of an immunology lab at the National Institutes of Health, will cause a “tectonic shift” at the NIAID, where his successor will encounter a politically charged environment that looks nothing like the one we knew before Covid.

Fauci played an outsize role in building and establishing an operation that can respond quickly to new, emerging threats — from AIDS to H1N1 to Zika and Ebola, Peter Hotez, dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at the Baylor College of Medicine, told Nightly. But by the end of his tenure, Fauci was a staple of Republican campaign commercials — a pandemic-era hero to many Democrats but a preening, overbearing bureaucrat to many on the right.

National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Anthony Fauci. | Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

The politics of public health, now as polarized as anywhere else in government, will demand careful consideration about how Fauci’s wide-ranging responsibilities should be filled.

“I know Tony pretty well. I have no idea what his politics are. Reagan and both Bushes liked him. Clinton and Obama liked him,” Tom Frieden, former CDC director and president and CEO of Resolve to Save Lives, a global public health initiative, told Nightly. “The country has just gotten so hyper-partisan, that that space for someone who’s nonpartisan is very little.”

It’s likely that we’ll never see another Fauci-like figure juggling three roles and navigating the nexus of science and politics in such a public-facing manner, former Surgeon General Jerome Adams said.

In Adams’ view, the next Fauci will instead be a team of people: Someone to advise the president, someone to head NIAID and someone to lead the immunology laboratory. This separation of responsibilities matters more than ever in today’s political environment, he said.

“I can tell you that I, and most of my former and current colleagues, feel the real harm that has come from us being thrust into these roles where we were seen as part of an administration in a very politically volatile time,” Adams said. “And that reflected on the institutions that we were representing — it reflected on the CDC, and reflected on the NIH, and reflected on the Office of the Surgeon General in ways that were unfortunate, that none of us wanted or expected.”

It’s still important for White House officials to have trusted experts they can lean on for advice as new crises arise, Frieden said. But in his experience, while it’s tempting to create “cross-cutting positions,” it’s organizationally smoother when agency experts remain within their lanes. With how Fauci’s role evolved, given his decades of experience, he was ultimately tapped as the scientific lead for Covid — a role much larger than would have normally been expected of an NIAID head.

“In my experience, the best [practice] is to strengthen the lines, basically, to make sure that the agencies that are supposed to be doing their jobs do their jobs well,” Frieden said. “If you want a chief science adviser, that’s someone within the Office of Science and Technology Policy for the president. If you want a chief public health outbreak control adviser, that’s the relevant specialist at the CDC. If you want someone to lead research on infectious diseases, that’s the head of NIAID.”

It made sense at the time to tap into Fauci’s varied talents — as a scientist, a communicator and a respected adviser. But as Fauci moves to his next, post-government chapter, Adams said, it will be beneficial to allow the next NIAID head to maintain a degree of anonymity to the public, as Fauci once had pre-pandemic, and to have people like Ashish Jha, the White House Covid response coordinator, take on the more forward-facing political communication role.

Adams sees this as a chance to improve upon the flow of information from government agencies, both to the public and the White House.

“We want people to know who these folks are and to respect them at times of crisis, but we don’t want them to be in the news every time [Kentucky GOP senator and harsh Fauci critic] Rand Paul decides that he’s upset with the administration,” Adams said.

What keeps the former surgeon general up at night is his fear that talented candidates won’t want these jobs after what Fauci and other public health officials have faced over the last few years. Fauci has received death threats, and his daughters have been harassed — and Adams worries that this vitriol is a big part of why Fauci is stepping down.

Even today, after Fauci’s announcement, GOP lawmakers said his retirement wouldn’t stop them from calling him to the Hill for an investigation into the government’s pandemic response if they take back Congress.

Welcome to POLITICO Nightly. Reach out with news, tips and ideas at nightly@politico.com. Or contact tonight’s author at mward@politico.com or on Twitter @MyahWard.

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WHAT'D I MISS?

— South Dakota Gov. Noem may have ‘engaged in misconduct,’ ethics board says: A South Dakota ethics board today said it found sufficient information that Gov. Kristi Noem may have “engaged in misconduct” when she intervened in her daughter’s application for a real estate appraiser license that it could take action against her. The three retired judges on the Government Accountability Board determined that “appropriate action” could be taken against Noem, who has been floated as a potential 2024 candidate for president, though it didn’t specify the action.

— Gang of 8 wants to see Trump Mar-a-Lago search docs: The group of congressional leaders charged with reviewing the most sensitive intelligence information has asked the Biden administration for access to the documents seized from former President Donald Trump’s private residence in Florida , according to two people with direct knowledge of the request. The inquiry from the so-called Gang of 8 comes as lawmakers from both parties seek to learn more about the unprecedented investigation into the former president. And it suggests that Congress is unwilling to be a bystander in the political and legal fallout following the FBI’s Aug. 8 search of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Fla.

— Trump files suit demanding special master in Mar-a-Lago search case: Trump today made his first foray into the legal fight over the FBI search of his Mar-a-Lago estate, seeking the appointment of a “special master” to screen seized materials for potential privileged information. In a legal filing this afternoon in federal court in Florida, attorneys for Trump asked the court to appoint a third party to sift through the records FBI seized two weeks ago as part of an investigation into unlawful retention of classified information, misappropriation of presidential and federal records and potential obstruction of justice.

AROUND THE WORLD

A man looks over the wreckage after a missile struck a shopping mall in July in Sloviansk, Ukraine. | Scott Olson/Getty Images

EVACUATION ORDER — Ludmila Bohomolova and her husband Mykola know what it means to stay behind after the Russian tanks roll in. The two teachers endured what they describe as five months of hell following the occupation of their village, Pavlivka in eastern Ukraine, earlier this year, writes Lily Hyde.

Unable to provide security or essential services for nearly 750,000 people in areas where the fighting is fiercest, the Ukranian government now insists they should move elsewhere in the country. Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk, though, has framed the evacuation order not as a requirement that people leave their homes, but as the right of citizens to be provided with transport out of danger, financial aid and accommodation in safer areas.

Under criticism from humanitarian organizations for not having done enough to protect civilians in combat zones, Kyiv is undertaking what Vereshchuk has described as “the biggest movement of people in the history of the independent Ukrainian state.”

More than 12 million Ukrainians have been displaced by the war, most of them within the country. The government says it expects another 220,000 to evacuate from Donetsk region in east Ukraine before winter. Vereshchuk, who is also the minister for reintegration of temporarily occupied territories, says the evacuation order will be extended to another 500,000 people in areas occupied by Russia or at risk of being so in the regions of Kherson, Zaporizhzhia and Kharkiv.

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NIGHTLY NUMBER

1,900

The number of dock workers who went on strike this week at the United Kingdom’s largest port , located in Felixstowe. The port handles more than 4 million containers a year and can accommodate the largest cargo ships in operation. It provides services to and from over 700 ports around the world. Staff at the port want better pay, as the cost-of-living crisis squeezes their incomes.

PARTING WORDS

Eric Adams and friends at Zero Bond. | Eugene Gologursky/Getty Images for Haute Living

OUT ON THE TOWN — New York City Mayor Eric Adams doesn’t want reporters asking too many questions about his after-hours habits — lest the people he’s meeting there get cold feet, writes Julian Shen-Barro.

A self-described “nightlife mayor,” Adams has been known to wine and dine at swanky restaurants and exclusive clubs like the members-only Zero Bond and high-end Midtown eatery Osteria La Baia. Today, he decried a report linking La Baia to two of his friends who were convicted of felonies in 2014 — a connection first reported by POLITICO.

The arrangements have raised questions about whom the mayor spends his private time with, and whether he’s receiving gifts that should be reported in political disclosures. Adams, who makes a more than $250,000 salary as mayor, said he picks up his own dinner tabs.

“I pay every bill, not the city. ... What mayor have you ever asked to get receipts for his private dinners?” he said, refusing to provide proof he’s paying. He likewise refused to identify who grants him access to exclusive clubs such as Zero Bond, where a membership costs $4,000 a year.

“If I tell you who I go with, you all are going to do four-page stories on them,” he said. “Nobody is going to want to hang out with me anymore.”