It is "absolutely false" to say that governors aren't doing their job, Maryland governor says

Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan has responded to the Trump administration’s claim that governors have plenty of coronavirus tests and should just get to work on testing.

To “say we aren’t doing our job, is just absolutely false," Hogan told CNN on Sunday.

Hogan said he and other governors are doing everything they can to push toward the reopening of their economies in a safe manner.

“I don’t think it’s helpful to encourage demonstrations and encourage people to go against the president’s own policy,” Hogan said, adding that “the President’s own guidelines say you should have 14 days of declining numbers before you start to consider phase 1 of reopening."

“To encourage people to go protest the plan that you just made recommendations on, on Thursday, it just doesn’t make any sense,” Hogan added.

Hogan summed up his thoughts on the mixed messages coming from the White House by saying, “we’re sending completely conflicting messages out to the governors and to the people, as if we should ignore federal policy and federal recommendations.”

Some context: Since the earlier days of the crisis, the nation's governors and the Trump administration have tangled over whether the much-needed expansion of testing capacity is the responsibility of the states or the federal government.

Exasperated after a week in which industry leaders, governors, Democratic senators and even allies warned Trump and Vice President Mike Pence that the nation cannot get back to business-as-usual without a substantial increase in testing nationally, Trump faulted governors Saturday for not moving quickly enough to ramp up capacity in their states.

Pushing back on Trump's insistence that the federal government should merely serve as a backstop for states, several governors have argued that Trump's hope for reopening the economy cannot happen until there is adequate testing in their states and that they need federal aid to do that.

But during a White House briefing Saturday, the President lashed out at governors for complaining and charged that testing is simply the latest coronavirus issue that Democrats are politicizing to convince Americans that Trump is mishandling the coronavirus response.

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