| Get Jonathan Bernstein's newsletter every morning in your inbox. Click here to subscribe. According to news reports on Monday, two models of the future path of the coronavirus pandemic have reportedly been circulating within the administration. One was a "cubic" model put together by White House economic adviser Kevin Hassett that predicts deaths from the coronavirus "essentially going to zero by May 15." Kevin Drum, among others, was dismissive of that idea. The other model was much more interesting. It was reportedly a draft from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and it reached the alarming conclusion that the country could be facing 200,000 new infections and 3,000 deaths per day by the end of the month. The White House pushed back against that one, evidently trying to use the Hassett model as spin. There are at least three interpretations of what's going on with the CDC model and why it leaked. Nate Silver speculated that perhaps it was an attempt to get some scary numbers on the record so that President Donald Trump could then portray the eventual results as a success, even if they're pretty bad. Plausible! On the other hand, Trump already frequently mentions the high mortality levels that would've been reached had the government done nothing at all, and he doesn't hesitate to exaggerate even those numbers. A second possibility is that this really was a draft model that leaked out accidentally and wouldn't have become a part of the policy-planning process, as the White House has suggested. What I suspect, however, is yet a third possibility: The model was put together to scare Trump. After all, the president did eventually come out in full support of harsh social-distancing measures after his task force convinced him that doing nothing would be a disaster. He still compares the U.S. response favorably to Sweden's more permissive strategy. And even now, when talking about the urgency of reopening businesses, he emphasizes the need to maintain best practices. It seems quite possible that the public-health experts might've been trying to push the president to lend more significant support to his own reopening guidelines. Of course, the White House's decision to mostly abdicate responsibility to the states doesn't seem to be up for grabs, at least for now. But a gradual, phased-in reopening is going to work a lot better if the president is saying responsible things about it than if he's taking the side of conspiracy-addled demonstrators. Perhaps that's all the public-health professionals can hope to get out of the administration right now. If this is evidence that they're trying, it's what passes for good news these days. 1. Charlotte Hill, Jacob Grumbach, Adam Bonica and Hakeem Jefferson on voting by mail. 2. Dan Drezner on Trump's senior staff. 3. Geoffrey Skelley and Julia Azari on Representative Justin Amash's campaign. I'm still not convinced that Amash will do better than a total unknown Libertarian Party candidate. 4. Alan Greenblatt talks with Matt Grossmann about state governments after the pandemic. 5. Natasha Korecki looks back at former Vice President Joe Biden's role in responding to the H1N1 and Ebola outbreaks. 6. Donald K. Sherman on the Trump administration and transition planning. 7. Greg Sargent on the coronavirus spreading to contested and Republican states. 8. And Scott Wong and Mike Lillis on how the Capitol complex is handling the pandemic. I think the Senate's return is better than the House's decision to stay home. And, yes, it is beyond belief that there still isn't enough personal protective equipment for Congress to safely go about its business. Get Early Returns every morning in your inbox. Click here to subscribe. Also subscribe to Bloomberg All Access and get much, much more. You'll receive our unmatched global news coverage and two in-depth daily newsletters, the Bloomberg Open and the Bloomberg Close. | 
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