The federal government is loaded with obscure agencies that perform vital functions. We never hear about them, but Steve Bannon would call them “the deep state.” There is nothing deep about them. While they may be obscure, eliminating or cutting their personnel generally creates problems.
One such agency is the Office of Financial Research, created during the Obama administration to serve as an early warning system for emerging risks.
The agency’s staff has been slashed by more than 50 percent since 2017 to 96 employees, and its role has been relegated to largely assisting the Financial Stability Oversight Council, rather than collecting and analyzing data to identify emerging economic threats across financial sectors, according to current and former officials.
“Once Trump took office, every day they have been finding ways to deregulate and weaken the financial regulatory structure,” Mr. Brown [Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio] said in an interview. “They clearly are not prepared for a financial crisis, no matter what precipitates it.”
I understand that the coronavirus is a terrible blow to the economy. I also know that actions by the Trump administration have made matters far worse than they would have been under a normal administration.
Info from this post is taken from Alan Rappeport and Jeanna Smialek, “The Biggest Test Since thew ’08 Crisis,” New York Times, (Mar. 10, 2020), pp. B1, B4.
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