Trump Tweets That CDC School Reopening Guidance Is Too Tough, Federal Public Health Agency Promptly Determines Federal Public Health Guidance Is Too Tough

WASHINGTON. President Donald J. Trump on Wednesday morning publicly criticized the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's recently issued guidance on safely reopening American schools during the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, characterizing recommendations developed by federal pediatricians and epidemiologists as "very tough and expensive," at which point Vice President Mike Pence appeared at a White House briefing to confirm that the federal public health agency would, as a result, issue revised guidance.

The original document, released in late May, had recommended that schools serving the roughly 56 million American children enrolled in K-12 institutions implement measures including six-foot spacing, staggered scheduling, daily symptom checks, frequent disinfection, and contingency plans for periods in which in-person instruction would not be safe. By midafternoon Wednesday, the agency had confirmed that additional guidance, characterized internally as "supplemental," would be released in the coming weeks, with the President's tweets cited by aides as the precipitating event in a process that observers described as the first known instance of the CDC revising peer-reviewed pandemic guidance in response to a social media post.

"I disagree with @CDCgov on their very tough & expensive guidelines for opening schools," Mr. Trump wrote in the post Pence subsequently confirmed had been read at the agency. CDC Director Robert Redfield, asked at the same briefing whether the guidance itself would be revised, said the document would "not be revised" but would be accompanied by "additional reference documents," a distinction administration officials described as substantive but did not elaborate upon. The revised guidance, released two weeks later, devoted substantially expanded attention to the importance of in-person learning, with corresponding reductions in the prominence of the underlying epidemiological concerns the original document had been designed to address.

The administration's broader position, articulated by the President in subsequent appearances, was that the science of pediatric coronavirus transmission was less developed than the political case for reopening schools before the November election, and that the CDC's role under the circumstances was to align the former with the latter rather than the reverse. The President added at a White House event the same week that "schools should be opened" and "the cases are going to be coming down very rapidly," a forecast that proved inaccurate in the relevant timeframe, with the seven-day average of new daily U.S. cases rising from roughly 49,000 on the day of the tweet to over 65,000 by the end of the month.

Sources within the administration noted that the precedent established that week, in which a tweet from the President produced a substantive change in federal pandemic guidance within hours, would prove operationally useful in subsequent disputes with the agency, including over mask recommendations and vaccine timelines later that fall.

At press time, the President had moved on to publicly contradicting his own CDC director on the projected timeline for a coronavirus vaccine, a topic on which the director was, in the President's view, also wrong.