All the mechanisms established by the Federal Emergency Management Agency over the years have overnight been used to appoint a group of inexperienced volunteers to be responsible for supplying medical supplies.
This is reported by The New York Times, citing its own sources familiar with the situation.
Earlier News Front reported that the coronavirus epidemic in the United States was accompanied by a catastrophic shortage of personal protective equipment. The fact that U.S. companies were actively selling their products to China contributed greatly to this situation. In January and February of this year, export volumes of medical products from the U.S. to China reached a record for decades.
When the shortage of protective equipment began to inconvenience American physicians, Jeffrey Hendricks from South Carolina approached the Federal Emergency Management Agency with a proposal for assistance. He had the necessary contacts with Chinese manufacturers, as well as several million masks from well-known suppliers. His offer was accepted, but only to hand it over to a group of inexperienced volunteers formed by the administration and headed by U.S. President Jared Kouchner’s son-in-law.
The task force was tasked with sifting through the thousands of applications for medical products. Those eligible were to be referred to an emergency agency. The problem was that many really good bids were crossed out, as priorities were set according to “recommendations from President Trump’s political allies and associates. Moreover, the President’s close associates put direct pressure on the officials of the emergency agency.
“The nature and scale of the response seemed completely inadequate”, – one of the volunteers told journalists on condition of anonymity because he was signing a non-disclosure agreement. He called the events “bureaucratic cycles of chaos”.
This approach led to at least one scandal that took place in late March. At that time, Kushner’s team recommended that an engineer from Silicon Valley buy a thousand ventilators. A $69 million contract was made, but none of the machines were delivered. Now the authorities are trying to get the money back.
“There is an old saying in emergency management: Disaster is not the right time to exchange business cards”, – said Tim Manning, an ex-officer at the agency. – And this is absolutely not a good time to create new mechanisms.