Federal Supply System For Coronavirus Is "Crony Capitalism"

Donald Trump's handling of the Coronavirus epidemic in this country has been nothing short of incompetent. He acted far too slowly after being notified of the coming epidemic as early as December of 2019. He finally put a ban on travel from China, but only after nearly 400,000 people had flown from China to the United States. And even though it quickly became obvious that the ban was too late and the virus was spreading in the U.S., he took not further action until about the middle of March.

His slow action was also a primary cause of the shortage of ventilators, tests, and protective gear for medical workers. He has refused to actually use the Defense Production Act, and even though he now brags about what he has done, those shortages still exist. And putting Jared Kushner in charge of a committee overseeing the supply chain has just caused chaos -- piling greedy incompetence on top of greedy incompetence. He favors his buddies in large corporations over smaller business that have proven they can deliver. It is the very essence of "crony capitalism".

The following is part of an article from NBC News:

For weeks, Trump has resisted pressure to use the full power of his office to temporarily turn the private sector into an arm of the federal government in a national emergency. But he and his lieutenants instead have used the crisis to make federal assets and personnel ancillary to industry, according to NBC's interviews with dozens of public- and private-sector sources involved in various aspects of the coronavirus response.

In doing so, the vice president's coronavirus task force — mostly through a supply-chain unit led by Admiral John Polowczyk and heavily influenced by White House adviser Jared Kushner — has favored some of the nation's largest corporations and ignored smaller producers of goods and services with long track records of meeting emergency needs, according to officials at multiple federal agencies and people familiar with contracting.

They have also operated almost entirely in the dark, releasing few details of their arrangements with the big companies; created a new and convoluted emergency response system; and sown confusion and distrust in the states and among the people who need medical supplies.

There is virtually no accountability for their decisions about how and where to allocate emergency equipment, a vacuum that has produced strong criticism from Democratic congressional officials, who are demanding answers.

The story of the supply-chain group, a power center within the larger task force run by Vice President Mike Pence, is one of chaos, secrecy and ineptitude, these officials said. Governors, local officials and veterans of federal emergency response say it has deeply complicated the national fight against the pandemic. . . .

With so many ad-hoc groups purchasing goods and services for the crisis — the White House coronavirus task force, one of its seven subsidiary task forces, or other government agencies — it’s impossible to tell whether taxpayers are getting the best deals possible or are being gouged. . . .

The supply chain task force leaders pushed aside the existing federal emergency management response teams that had long-established methods for engaging assistance from the public and private sectors. Instead, they first reached out to personal contacts, according to people familiar with their operations. To the extent that they have absorbed some of the old practices over the course of time, with the help of career officials intent on bringing their actions in line with protocol, it has taken time to figure out their own system.

"Jared and his friends decided they were going to do their thing," said the senior government official involved in the response effort. "It cost weeks." . . .

In one wrinkle that has had repercussions for small businesses and communities around the country, the task force ended FEMA's long-running practice of using its regional offices to locate, pay for and acquire goods from smaller local vendors in an emergency, preferring instead to contract with heavyweights. . . .

Working from a war room on the first-floor concourse between two towers of the FEMA’s leased headquarters in southwest Washington, the task force was handed the keys to the deepest treasury in the world, and it empowered the Trump administration to quietly corner the scarce market of medical goods in the United States and overseas. . . .

Using what it calls a "40-40-20" formula, the task force buys whatever it can get its hands on and then allocates the goods, according to the people familiar with the response effort. The first 20 percent is reserved for the federal government’s Strategic National Stockpile. The task force directs where the next 40 percent goes, and the company selling the product gets to deliver the remaining 40 percent as it sees fit. . . .

In practice, the 40-40-20 arrangement means the federal task force can re-route a shipment that is already on its way to a state, city or hospital that previously had agreed to buy it from the supplier. . . .

Right now, what the public is getting from its money is a process that state and local officials, along with the frontline hospitals and medical personnel, have been forced to spend valuable time trying to figure out. In some cases, they have wasted that time bidding against the federal government for supplies.

The only people who claim to understand what’s going on are political officials who work closely with Trump, Pence and Kushner — and representatives of some of the companies in the supply chain.