“Doomsday planners can’t conjure up every possible future calamity. But their warnings can prompt the government to react quickly, to adapt to ambiguity, and to treat uncertainty as a feature of good social science, not an excuse to avoid prudent precautions. Nicholas Rasmussen, who participated in national-security continuity planning as a senior counterterrorism adviser to George W. Bush and Obama, told me that, at the moment, the U.S. government doesn’t ‘really have a plan for a scenario where we are down 50 percent of our workforce.’ The national-security agencies, including the CIA, have predesignated employees as ‘essential’ and cross-trained thousands to perform essential jobs should those employees become sick. But a pandemic doesn’t distinguish among people, and therefore doesn’t avoid those deemed essential, said Rasmussen, who was also the head of the National Counterterrorism Center until 2017…
“‘I worked through every shutdown, every snowstorm, because you can’t work from home,’ Rasmussen said. Normally, he said, agency counterintelligence and security officials would veto suggestions to change work paradigms, because each shift away from a centralized structure could introduce any number of new potential vulnerabilities. ‘I would imagine they’ll have a harder time saying, “No, we won’t even think about that anymore,”‘ Rasmussen said…”