“15 Days to Slow the Spread”: How Bad Bureaucratic Decisions Made Covid-19 Worse

March 2025 marks the fifth anniversary since American businesses closed their doors during the Covid-19 pandemic. Among a slew of other terrible federal bureaucratic orders, “15 Days to Slow the Spread” of the Covid-19 virus was not based on accurate or well-informed science. Indeed, it was directly contrary to long-standing (and scientifically informed) pre-pandemic planning for responding to an airborne virus.

Nor was it based on the Constitution. The Covid lockdowns and mandates violated more civil liberties of more Americans more severely than any other federal government action of our lifetimes. The extent and degree of civil liberties violated were so vast and so harsh that it is hard to even come up with a close second short of the military draft—and at least Congress voted for the draft.

We know now that the effort for “15 days” became more than two years of closed offices and businesses. The nationwide lockdown did little or nothing to prevent the spread of the Covid-19 virus. However, locking down healthy Americans, prohibiting worship services, closing schools, shuttering “non-essential” workplaces (many of which never recovered and were essential to people’s livelihoods), limiting access to hospitals (where loved ones were dying), destroying supply chains, mandating vaccines, censoring dissent, and all the rest of the bureaucracy’s botched management caused an immense amount of unnecessary harm and permanent damage on top of what the virus itself caused.

Over the next 15 days, NCLA will catalog some of these bad bureaucratic decisions and the lasting damage they produced. We do not do so to relive the misery we all experienced, nor to recount the various lawsuits that NCLA brought—many successfully—against these unconstitutional policies. Rather, some five years later, we believe it is important to ensure that all Americans remember how spectacularly the government, the Administrative State, failed during the Covid-19 pandemic.

The people who issued these life-altering orders were not heroes; those who showed more interest in covering their own tracks in funding risky gain-of-function research than in battling the virus were downright villainous. Hundreds of millions of Americans got a dose of what life would be like under arbitrary bureaucratic rule, and they did not like it. Yet our elected leaders have done precious little to prevent such mismanagement from happening again.

Starting today, NCLA will release two dozen short (3-minute read) essays explaining some of the worst bureaucratic decisions and the resulting adverse consequences in hopes that Congress will stir to action. Congress voted in 1971 to end the military draft. What has Congress done to prevent lockdowns and all the other bureaucratic abuses during the Covid pandemic from recurring?

Mark Chenoweth, NCLA President