Top Democrats on Tuesday slammed the Trump administration’s response to the coronavirus outbreak after lawmakers attended a closed-door briefing on the crisis.

“Here in the United States, the Trump administration has been caught flat-footed. The administration has no plan to deal with the coronavirus, no plan and seemingly no urgency to develop one,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said on the Senate floor.

He characterized the Trump administration’s response as tainted with “towering and dangerous incompetence.” There are currently 53 coronavirus cases in the United States.

The White House has asked for $2.5 billion in funds to combat the coronavirus outbreak. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., has called the plan “long overdue” and said that it is “completely inadequate” relative to the size of the emergency.

Republicans have mostly signaled their support for the White House’s request, but Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah, has said that the U.S. is “substantially underinvesting” in the prevention of an outbreak.

Trump, while on a diplomatic visit to India, tweeted that “coronavirus is very much under control in the USA.” Trump has also claimed that the U.S. is “very close to a vaccine.”

The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) has said that a vaccine for the outbreak is unlikely to be available in the next 12 to 18 months. A top CDC official, Nancy Messonnier, has claimed that a coronavirus outbreak on U.S. territory is now inevitable.

“Ultimately, we will see community spread in this country,” she told reporters Tuesday. “It’s not a question of if but rather a question of when and how many people in this country will have severe illness.”

There are currently more than 80,000 global cases of the coronavirus, with the death toll over 2,700. The virus originated at an animal and seafood market in China, and forced the Chinese government to put millions of its citizens on lockdown.

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