1 month can mess up an institution, 3 years is long enough to completely change one. I'm not saying that's what this admin did to the CDC or FDA (at least not completely), but to act like 3 years is some short time to affect change is crazy. Continuity matters, and inertia is also important when looking at how change affects gov't bodies. Institutional knowledge is a real thing, which is why continuity is important. If you drain the swamp, or more apropo to this administration, insert your cronies in place of long standing professionals and call it draining the swamp, you lose institutional knowledge. Wont matter when it comes to a lot of day to day functions, because the body can still largely self regulate with a change in leadership, but it matters a lot when edge scenarios come into play.
Flu season? Its as common as doing annual evaluations, the CDC doesn't really need any real direction to handle it. The FDA doesnt have to make any hard decisions on approvals. Novel, highly contagious virus? We want all our pieces in play. Budget cuts at the CDC hampered that response. We lost positions in China that could have given us better info earlier. We lost funding to state and local governments that could have alerted us to cases in the US earlier. Is this a Trump issue? Not entirely, the R's have been attacking the CDC's budget since before Trump came on board, but Trump is on board to continue those efforts.
Inertia is also important with gov't orgs. They are like oil tankers, changes to course are slow, and take a long time to complete. That's why this line of thinking is absurd.
You cant spool up an effective national response to something like this quickly. You need pieces in place at the start. Assembling the team takes time. Having the team establish their roles and start coordinating with national, state, and local orgs takes even longer. The right way is to have that team in place, ready to fire, at all times. The US government isn't a business, treating it like one is stupid. We don't mothball our military while they don't have wars to fight, because we understand the impact of not being prepared for a fight. Rs have no problem pumping money into defense despite the fact that the chance of the military directly intervening to save US lives are slim because all of their work occurs OCONUS. Yet somehow, mothballing our medical response is somehow a smart business move, even though it has the more immediate effect of saving citizens lives. The CDC is a piece, and previous administrations recognized that it wasnt strong enough on its own and stood up the pandemic response team. Trump's admin decided something different. The change is on him.
Government organizations have bloat. They have dead weight. Just like bigger companies have bloat, and dead weight. Leaders impact that. Trump wanted the big job, he gets the good and bad with it. He has had 3 years to change things for better or worse. Blaming previous administrations points to poor leadership on his part, because he didn't recognize issues and fix them. He didn't appoint good people to steer those ships. He didn't check on those ships to make sure they were on course. You don't get to claim total authority and say you don't take any responsibility.