Several outlets reported yesterday evening that Trump is planning to shut down the coronavirus task force and Vice President Mike Pence, who ostensibly leads the task force, confirmed they were considering it.
Those reports appear to have been at least partially true to some extent as Trump took to Twitter this morning to say he's rebranding the task force to focus on treatment rather than crisis response.
President Trump appeared to reverse course on the decision to wind down the coronavirus task force, instead rebranding it. He tweeted today that the task force will “continue on indefinitely” and shift its focus to “SAFETY & OPENING UP OUR COUNTRY AGAIN.” [...]
He also said that task force members may be added or subtracted “as appropriate” and will “also be very focused on Vaccines & Therapeutics.”
There's a 95 percent chance that Trump's morning tweets were the first time that members of the task force including Pence heard they would be rebranded.
Also, Trump's tweets are no guarantee this will actually happen.
In any event, you might say it doesn't really matter what the fate of the task force is. Trump's task force never did anything of importance and if it's rebranded into something else that does not mean it will suddenly do anything important. It will still be irrelevant under a different name.
Large populous states with (mostly) Democratic governors have led the way from the beginning, but not because they refused to cooperate with the federal government or the task force. There was no one to cooperate with; no one at the helm. Trump's plan was that there is no plan and states should decided what to do themselves because he had and has no clue.
Not to contradict myself, but maybe it does matter to the extent that fewer Americans would have died if we had a functioning government. We've passed 72,000 deaths in the United States as of this morning.