Fauci's Times interview is basically "Don't blame me: I just offered advice. It's the job of others to examine tradeoffs." The problem with this position is that it is demonstrably false in (at least) three ways:
Fauci et al did not simply offer advice. They stragitically manipulated (or outright lied) the advice they gave in order to achieve their desired goals. Fauci has said so himself (see his interview with The Street on 12 June 2020, or with the NYT on 24 December 2020). Birx says so as well in her recent book. These comments were not simply advice: they were intentional efforts to sway people's actions through the manipulation of data.
Fauci explicitly worked to crush all dissent about his plan. Indeed, the Great Barrington Declaration, which states that tradeoffs need to be examined, he called "fringe" and "dangerous" and collaborated with the media to crush it. That is not simply offering advice.
Government agencies do not simply offer advice, and definately not during the pandemic. In many cases, the comments of Fauci et al carried with them the weight of law as many governors simply said "we'll follow whatever the CDC recommends." If Fauci et al truly believed all they were doing was giving advice and that others needed to be part of the conversation as well, this should have been their wake-up call. And yet, they embraced their position as the voice directing policy.
Fauci and the other experts failed (by their own standards; remember that Fauci proudly proclaimed that his advice was working and we'd only have 60k deaths) precisely because they were not simply offering advice. They isolated themselves from the feedback mechanisms necessary to improve their advice, allowing their bad behavior to have both cascading consequences as well as becoming lodged into American policy. To avoid such a public health failure in the future, we need to create a system that is robust to failure.