This is an important point buried in snark: when Trump came in, the careerists left. The government hollowed out like Venezuela. But when Trump left, the sycophants largely left with him - I mean, what's the point of having the title if you have to do the work? - which has left pretty much everything open for a new breed of careerists.

I think the pandemic-response-unit-in-exile probably would have done things differently. And I think the fact that they've been conducting diplomacy without an embassy, essentially, put a real kink in the chain of command. The fact that the Trumpistas gave less of a shit about the CDC than pretty much anything else means that a lot of them lingered and tried to do what they needed to do in a hostile situation... but the actual pandemic brain trust had been long since fired and they were free to snark at the people running the show.

I'm hopeful the CDC will get their shit together moving forward. Things should be less tangled than before. But there's still a hell of a tangle to un-knot and the whole "we can't have a World Health Organization if we lock China out" combined with "but obviously China needs to be locked out because they damn near ended the world through carelessness" dichotomy isn't going to resolve smoothly.