Trump Issues 3-Phase Plan to Reopen Economy

Trump, Mills said, "has made it clear that much of this is up to the states, so the states are creating consortiums to ensure that there is coordination. These consortiums will help, but you are likely to have a partisan divide in how some of the states chose to respond."

Hurdles for Employers

Phase 1 of the federal plan "really should be titled 'barely open,'" Mills said in a Friday morning email briefing. The economy says it is reopened but major restrictions remain. Also, of note, [the guidelines] only allow outpatient elective surgeries."

Phase 2 should be called "kind of open," according to Mills. "We have a hard time seeing how any state will meet the gating criteria to then be able to move to Phase 3."

Phase 3, meanwhile, is "wide open," Mills says, "but requires at minimum 42 days to pass from now (three cycles of the 14-day gating criteria) and could take months."

As for employers, the plan "proposes lots of new requirements" to meet before reopening like temperature checks, monitoring the workforce for active symptoms, and contact tracing for employees who test positive — which means "protecting employee privacy will be challenging."

If employers don't abide by the requirements they "likely will face litigation," Mills adds.

A Political Win

As to what Trump's plan could do for his re-election chances, Greg Valliere, chief U.S. policy strategist at AGF Investments, said in his Friday morning briefing that "Trump has devised a win-win scenario on the coronavirus — if his call to gradually reopen the country is perceived as successful, with falling death rates, he will get credit as the economy and the markets improve."

However, if "the reopening is rocky, with new clusters of infection and public frustration over restrictions, [Trump] can blame the governors, who now will call the shots…. Or he can blame the WHO, the media or Democrats. He's got cover — no one plays the blame game like him."