Okay - what I would want to ask is - is it reasonable to expect that a government with billions of dollars to spend on intelligence gathering, data analysis and various experts must be meeting at least one of these criteria:

- It has access to high quality information about the actual state of affairs in most relevant domains
- It is grossly incompetent or corrupt and the data is not available in an actionable format
- It willfully ignores the information, and some of its members actively work to prevent the information reaching the right people

The Corona virus is a good example. By the time it "arrived" in the USA, you can be all but certain the US government could have had a 20+ page detailed report lying on the desk of every secretary giving very actionable figures and probabilities about the threat at hand. The information would be incomplete, of course, but definitely enough to get busy in a nominally effective way.

While I know that Trump is said to have disbanded various institutions that work to anticipate and prepare for pandemics, still it would seem to me that a huge apparatus like the US government should be able to collect and otherwise infer a significant amount of information that would allow it to mount at least a reasonable response.

Or to phrase my question differently - should it be seen as an act of gross incompetence that a resourceful and powerful government like the one in the US failed to act upon the information they either really did have, or should have prioritized to obtain? How is it remotely acceptable that "We just had no idea" is not a ludicrous and frankly preposterous position to be in, given the possibilities?

And of course there can be cases where even the US government can be caught off guard, make a set of misguided institutional choices - sure :) But I would say this happens very, very rarely, certainly not as often as the current administration seems to suggest.