A first in U.S. history

America is winning its war on the Coronavirus. President Trump announced another milestone over the weekend: More than 4 million Americans have now been tested.

“That’s a record anywhere in the world,” he said. The United States has now conducted more tests than France, the United Kingdom, South Korea, Japan, Singapore, India, Austria, Australia, Sweden, and Canada—combined.

Kellyanne Conway: It’s time to work together toward reopening America.

President Trump’s response is unprecedented for another reason, too—one that most Americans won’t see covered in the news. “Throughout history, national emergencies have led to a more powerful and centralized federal government,” Hudson Institute Distinguished Fellow Christopher DeMuth writes in The Wall Street Journal.

Until now. “For the first time in U.S. history, an administration is responding to a crisis with deregulation and decentralization,” he says.

Here’s why. Career politicians, both in Washington and around the world, have one instinct during an emergency: to grab power. It’s rarely temporary, and it often has little to do with the situation at hand. Instead, politicians create more agencies and more red tape, claiming that Bigger Government will prevent the next great threat.

The opposite happens. A slow, bureaucratic response globally made the Coronavirus worse. The World Health Organization, with its $2.4 billion annual budget, didn’t prepare the world for Coronavirus—it downplayed the risk while parroting claims from the Chinese Communist Party that the virus wasn’t spreading between humans.

Elsewhere in the world, countries with government-run socialized medicine have been forced to ration care, often at the expense of older patients.

In the United States, President Trump moved to slash red tape quickly, eliminating outdated rules and bureaucracy around testing, treatments, telemedicine, and more to speed up our nationwide response to his standards.

President Trump knows that Washington works best when it leads, not controls. His priority is making sure that every state, locality, and frontline worker has the resources needed to fight this virus. Whether it’s securing more ventilators or rapidly expanding testing, he’s brought in the full power of America’s best-on-Earth private sector to help.

The results show that America is unstoppable when it works together. Closely watched areas such as New York, Detroit, and New Orleans are stabilizing and seeing progress. Nationwide, the latest data suggests that America is past its peak for new cases—and on track to see far fewer deaths than even the most optimistic models once projected.

The President knows who to thank for winning this war: you. Our nation’s doctors, nurses, innovators, essential workers, and patriotic citizens are the best in the world.

“The American people have done a hell of a job,” he says.

Vice President Pence: Our large metro areas appear to be past their peak.

MORE: See President Trump’s phased approach for Opening Up America Again!