Yuri Gripas/Abaca/Sipa USA via AP Images
Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, left, participates in a National Dialogue on Safely Reopening Schools, at the White House, July 7, 2020.
To constitute depraved indifference, the defendant’s conduct must be so wanton, so deficient in a moral sense of concern, so lacking in regard for the life or lives of others, and so blameworthy as to warrant the same criminal liability as that which the law imposes upon a person who intentionally causes a crime.
— Legal definition of “depraved indifference”
As the United States plunges ever deeper into the COVID-19 pandemic, the Trump administration’s response consists chiefly of denial of the pandemic’s severity and failure to develop policies to keep Americans safe. Not just Trump himself but two of his Cabinet secretaries have played central roles in what amounts to a national policy of depraved indifference to the lives of their fellow citizens.
Education Secretary Betsy DeVos is continuing to insist that schools reopen this September, though exceptions can be made, she says, for local “flare-ups.” She has also threatened to withhold federal funds from school districts that don’t reopen. In this, she is making policy from Trump’s insistence on restarting the economy, which he sees as key to his re-election—even though our premature reopenings have indisputably led to the resurgence of the disease.
DeVos’s indifference doesn’t end there. As American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten has pointed out, one would have expected that Task #1 for the Department of Education during the past four months would be to figure out how to safely reopen schools or how best to teach students when physical schools are closed down. Surely, the department would study what kind of safety precautions would work best and provide the emergency funding that would enable school districts (all of which are strapped for funds) to put those safeguards in place. Instead, DeVos’s department has not studied these problems at all, much less provided the dedicated funds schools need to reopen safely or develop better ways to teach remotely.
Labor Secretary Eugene Scalia is no slouch at depraved indifference, either. Under Scalia’s leadership, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration has issued no rules for workplace safety during the pandemic, only nonenforceable guidelines. As of June 9, the agency had proposed all of one fine—to a nursing home, for $6,500—for violating its employees’ safety. No meatpacking plant has been told it must install safety devices or distance its workers, despite the fact that thousands of meatpacking workers have been infected and many have died. No business has been told it must keep its employees at a specified distance from one another.
While Trump is plainly a sociopath, Scalia is merely a believer in the sanctity of laissez-faire, and DeVos a sworn foe of public schools. Though coming from different places, all are guilty of depraved indifference to the deaths of their fellow Americans.
