26 November 2021: Cuomo's Toxic Pandemic Leadership

‘Ridiculous demands’ and ‘impossible requests’: Life outside Cuomo's pandemic war room

Here's the introduction to Shannon Young and Anna Gronewold's report in Politico, which draws upon new interviews with New York Department of Health officials to detail the Cuomo administration's interventions in the response of state and local public health officials during the early months of the 2020 coronavirus pandemic that made it worse.

No one dared tell Andrew Cuomo how terrible they thought his idea was.

In the summer of 2020, with Cuomo at the height of his pandemic-inflated fame, the then-governor of New York suggested that the state health department deploy half its roughly 5,000 employees to check restaurants for their compliance with the state's mask-wearing and capacity limit rules. Cuomo wanted to tout the number of tickets issued for noncompliance during his nationally televised news briefings, according to a former administration official who was on a call when the governor floated the idea.

“He was like, ‘You could use them like an army,’” said the official, who worked on the state’s pandemic response and requested anonymity to speak freely.

The governor's proposal — “an impossible request” — baffled the official, whose account was confirmed by another person familiar with the plan. But, the official said, "the call ended and no one said ‘no’ to him ... No one could explain to him how bad the idea was."

Cuomo, who resigned in August, is facing renewed scrutiny over his response to the pandemic, including allegations that he downplayed Covid deaths while writing a pandemic memoir that netted him more than $5 million. New POLITICO interviews with several former state Department of Health officials, along with a trove of government documents released this month, suggest the former governor’s behavior behind closed doors was in direct contrast to the science-first, hyper-competent image Cuomo presented in his Emmy-winning 2020 press conferences.

The interviews, combined with a legislative impeachment investigation report and transcripts made public by state Attorney General Tish James’ office, paint a picture of an administration in chaos at the height of the emergency, with political appointees and public health professionals frequently at war over decisions and messaging. As Cuomo projected calm during his daily public briefings, with thousands dying as the virus ravaged New York City, public health officials were forced to find ways to work around him.

Many NY DOH officials however obediently went along with Cuomo and his top staffers in the Executive Chamber, despite knowing what they were doing was, as in case of the enforcement of the administration's deadly 25 March 2020 directive, very wrong and would have deadly consequences. We would argue that many of these officials could face criminal and civil litigation for their roles in New York's COVID nursing home deaths scandals.

We think that is a major factor in why the cooperation of DOH officials with the NY Assembly's impeachment probe investigators stopped after Cuomo announced his resignation. They could no longer trade immunity from prosecution in return for their testimony against Cuomo during an impeachment trial. Until other investigations might produce criminal charges against Cuomo or his top staffers, where their testimony under oath could provide a basis for conviction, they will have little incentive to cooperate with investigators given their potential liability.

Overall, the report describes a toxic environment within New York's state government under Andrew M. Cuomo where few, if any, were capable of standing against the centralized planning edicts coming out from his Executive Chamber during the coronavirus pandemic.