Trump to Outline Reopening Guidance After Reassuring Lawmakers

(Bloomberg) -- President Donald Trump said he’ll announce federal guidelines on lifting stay-at-home orders that have collapsed the economy at 6 p.m. in Washington, after assuring lawmakers earlier Thursday that coronavirus testing is improving.

Trump said he would reveal the new guidelines during his daily news conference. He has been eager to return Americans to work and to schools even as the coronavirus outbreak crests in the U.S., where more than 641,000 people have been infected and more than 31,000 have died.

“We’re going to be talking about guidelines that have been very carefully done,” Trump said at a White House event, adding that he would brief governors on his plan in the afternoon. “I think they’ll be very happy with what we’re doing to win this war.”

In a call with senators earlier Thursday, lawmakers urged him to improve U.S. capacity to test for infections before any broad effort to reopen the economy. Trump told them that a self-administered saliva test and diagnostics to detect antibodies were closer to being widely available, two people familiar with the call said.

In one exchange, Republican Senator Pat Toomey said some counties in his home state of Pennsylvania have just a low number of cases and no deaths, urging Trump to support a resumption of limited economic activity in such areas even before universal testing is available. Trump told the senator he strongly agreed, the people said.

Toomey has said publicly that he thinks it is time to resume certain economic activities, such as outdoor construction projects, if workers follow social distancing guidelines, wear masks and get temperature checks.

“We’re not going to be able to wait for testing to give us the full confidence to move forward -- and that was brought up,” Republican Senator Mike Braun of Indiana, who was on the call, said in an interview. “Take the lowest-risk areas, start re-opening the economy, because there’s no way the federal government can be a substitute for a live economy.”

Other lawmakers warned that reopening too soon could spark a second wave of the outbreak. Democratic Senator Tom Carper of Delaware cautioned the president to be guided by science and refrain from relaxing rules until the crisis abates.

Trump thanked Carper for his comments and moved on to the next lawmaker, one of the people said.

Trump plans to reveal guidelines later Thursday for parts of the country to begin reopening. The announcement is an opportunity for the president to take a victory lap in the fight against coronavirus, which has sent the U.S. economy into a tailspin. Roughly 22 million Americans have filed for unemployment claims in the past three weeks, effectively erasing a decade of job creation.

John Kennedy, a Republican senator from Louisiana, said the U.S. economy could collapse if the nation remains largely shut down. Trump responded that some governors may be able to relax distancing rules in areas with few cases by the end of the month. Current federal guidelines expire on April 30.

Several lawmakers echoed concerns business executives raised with Trump on Wednesday, saying that testing capacity needs to be dramatically expanded in order to catch asymptomatic people who might be spreading the virus. Some senators also told Trump that without a widely available therapeutic drug, many Americans would be afraid to go back to their workplaces.

Trump suggested he might consider an executive action to expand access to prescription treatments. He has for weeks touted the anti-malaria drug hydroxychloroquine as a potential therapy for coronavirus. The medicine has been administered to many patients, but it isn’t yet proven effective against the disease and the medical community hasn’t publicly backed Trump’s endorsement.

The president told lawmakers Thursday that the country would be opening soon, but that every state would go about it differently. He said that states would be responsible for managing testing, while arguing that U.S. tests are superior to those of other countries.

Stephen Moore, a conservative economist who joined a Wednesday conference call with Trump, said the re-opening could occur along a partisan divide, arguing that blue states are more comfortable with government stay-at-home directives than red states that generally have lower populations and fewer virus cases.

“If you look at the map where the disease is happening, it’s mostly in blue states. A lot of these red states are going to live free or die,” Moore said in an interview.

But during a call with House lawmakers, several Democrats expressed their thanks to Trump for the steps he has taken and members in both parties said the economic recovery would be a difficult task that requires cooperation, according to an official on the call.

Iowa Republican Chuck Grassley raised concerns about meat processing plants shutting down and the ripple effect that has on the food supply chain, including for cattle and pork producers. Grassley said in a tweet he asked Trump to give the issue “special attn.”

Trump also hit China, saying the U.S. received no notice from the Chinese government about the threat posed by the coronavirus. The president and his GOP allies have repeatedly pointed to China as the villain of the outbreak, as they seek to shift blame away from Trump.

Tensions between Trump and states over when and how to reopen the economy boiled over this week. On Tuesday, the president backed away from an earlier claim that he has “ultimate authority” to reopen the country after broad criticism from legal scholars and governors, including New York’s Andrew Cuomo, who warned of “a constitutional crisis like you haven’t seen in decades” if the president sought to lift social-distancing requirements over states’ objections.

As Trump spoke to the senators, Cuomo announced that New York would remain under a lock-down until at least May 15.

The 10th Amendment to the Constitution reserves for states all powers that aren’t specifically granted to the federal government.

“They know when it’s time to open, and we don’t want to put pressure on anybody,” Trump said Tuesday at a White House briefing. “I’m not going to put any pressure on any governor to open.”

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