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Washington Post, May 6, 2020
Kushner coronavirus effort said to be hampered by inexperienced volunteers
By Yasmeen Abutaleb and Ashley Parker
The coronavirus response being spearheaded by President Trump’s
son-in-law, Jared Kushner, has relied in part on volunteers from
consulting and private equity firms with little expertise in the tasks
they were assigned, exacerbating chronic problems in obtaining supplies
for hospitals and other needs, according to numerous government
officials and a volunteer involved in the effort.
About two dozen employees from Boston Consulting Group, Insight,
McKinsey and other firms have volunteered their time — some on paid
vacation leave from their jobs and others without pay — to aid the Trump
administration’s response to the coronavirus pandemic, according to
administration officials and others familiar with the arrangement.
Although some of the volunteers have relevant backgrounds and
experience, many others were poorly matched with their assigned jobs,
including those given the task of securing personal protective equipment
(PPE) for hospitals nationwide, according to a complaint filed last
month with the House Oversight Committee.
The volunteer team played a significant role in helping the government
vet leads and send the results to a procurement team at the Federal
Emergency Management Agency, where government officials made final
decisions about purchases and procurements, two senior administration
officials said. The team’s problems underscore a broader pattern of
missteps and missed opportunities that has plagued the Trump
administration as it struggles to cope with the pandemic.
The complaint, obtained by The Washington Post, was submitted by a
volunteer who has since left the group and who spoke on the condition of
anonymity for fear of retribution from the administration. Key elements
of the complaint were confirmed by six administration officials and one
outside adviser to the effort, many of whom spoke on the condition of
anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.
A spokeswoman for the oversight panel declined to comment.
The document alleges that the team responsible for PPE had little
success in helping the government secure such equipment, in part because
none of the team members had significant experience in health care,
procurement or supply-chain operations. In addition, none of the
volunteers had relationships with manufacturers or a clear understanding
of customs requirements or Food and Drug Administration rules, according
to the complaint and two senior administration officials.
“Americans are facing a crisis of tragic proportions and there is an
urgent need for an effective, efficient and bold response,” reads the
complaint, which was sent to the committee on April 8. “From my few
weeks as a volunteer, I believe we are falling short. I am writing to
alert my representatives of these challenges and to ask that they do
everything possible to help front-line health-care workers and other
Americans in need.”
Supply-chain volunteers were instructed to fast-track protective
equipment leads from “VIPs,” including conservative journalists friendly
to the White House, according to the complaint and one senior
administration official.
“Fox & Friends” host Brian Kilmeade, for example, called two people he
knew in the administration to pass along a lead about PPE in an effort
to be helpful, said two people familiar with the outreach. Fox News
Channel host Jeanine Pirro also repeatedly lobbied the administration
for a specific New York hospital to receive a large quantity of masks,
one of the people said.
Kilmeade and Pirro said they were not aware that their tips were being
prioritized, a Fox News spokeswoman said.
The volunteer group tasked with securing protective equipment is part of
a broader coronavirus team set up by Kushner that spans the White House,
FEMA and the Department of Health and Human Services. Much of the effort
is run out of office space at FEMA headquarters.
Kushner and other key administration officials praised the volunteers’
efforts, which they said have helped the virus response.
“The bottom line is that this program sourced tens of millions of masks
and essential PPE in record time and Americans who needed ventilators
received ventilators,” Kushner said in a statement. “These volunteers
are true patriots.”
But some government officials have expressed alarm at the presence of
the volunteers, saying that their role in the response is unclear and
that they have needed guidance on basic questions.
Health experts said procuring PPE requires expertise in the different
types of equipment hospitals need, experience dealing with manufacturers
and an understanding of which types of masks, for instance, have FDA
approval.
“That’s the danger — there may be decisions being made that are not
fully informed and that’s going to lead to downstream effects on the
response,” said Amesh Adalja, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins
Center for Health Security and an infectious-disease physician. “The
people that are volunteering, they are donating their time and we have
to be grateful for that, but whoever is supervising them needs to match
their skills with what the needs are.”
Even as the volunteer group struggled to procure PPE, about 30 percent
of “key supplies,” including masks, in the national stockpile of
emergency medical equipment went toward standing up a separate
Kushner-led effort to establish drive-through testing sites nationwide,
according to a March internal planning document obtained by The Post and
confirmed by one current and one former administration official. Kushner
had originally promised thousands of testing sites, but only 78
materialized; the stockpile was used to supply 44 of those over five to
10 days, the document said.
One White House official denied that a third of the stockpile went to
Kushner’s initiative, but declined to provide details.
The team of volunteers focused on PPE had trouble developing
manufacturer relationships and making inroads with brokers, in part
because they were using personal email accounts, rather than official
government email addresses, the House Oversight Committee complaint
states. Three senior administration officials confirmed the volunteers’
use of personal email addresses.
In addition to the already challenging circumstances, the complaint also
says that on some of the teams, “minimal attempts at social distancing
are taken.”
Jordan Libowitz, a spokesman for Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics
in Washington, said that the volunteers should be classified as “special
government employees” and that the arrangement raises myriad concerns.
“This is the problem with operating off the books,” he said. “We just
don’t know if they’re following the law or not.”
The volunteers were told to save and share a copy of all of their
official emails, to comply with the Federal Records Act, according to
the volunteer and administration officials. But Libowitz said that “by
using private email accounts, we have no assurances that their emails
are being preserved. . . . This doesn’t prove anything nefarious is
going on, but if something nefarious was going on, this is how they
would do it.”
Two senior administration officials disputed a number of the concerns
outlined in the complaint. They said that the volunteers did not have
trouble vetting leads or getting responses from brokers or companies,
and that many of the volunteers had relevant backgrounds and experience.
The officials added that it is difficult to know whether the volunteers
received leads on protective equipment that resulted in procurement
because nongovernment employees did not have final decision or
purchasing authority.
The officials also said they had not heard of any sort of “VIP”
treatment prioritizing some leads over others.
“I believe the volunteers are competent, hard working and intelligent,
but we represent a smaller procurement team than at most midsized
companies despite the magnitude of the crisis,” the complaint says. “I
believe America deserves a larger, better-funded response. The team
generally works 12+ hour days, seven days per week, but frankly has
little to show for it.”
Kushner’s team is made up of private industry volunteers as well as
allies in government, including Brad Smith, director of the Centers for
Medicare and Medicaid Innovation, and Adam Boehler, a former HHS
official who was brought in to assist with the coronavirus response, as
well as private industry executives.
Some of the volunteers were asked to create models projecting how much
protective equipment the government would need to address the crisis,
while others worked to project potential drug shortages that hospitals
could face, according to four people familiar with the effort.
But administration officials deemed some of the models “too
catastrophic,” a person familiar with the situation said. The
administration ultimately decided to rely primarily on a model created
by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of
Washington that has had some of the most optimistic projections of cases
and deaths.
Those directly involved in Kushner’s effort were quick to praise the
volunteers, stressing that the team members — many of whom relocated to
Washington — upended their lives to try to help the administration
manage the deadly pandemic.
“In the face of this unprecedented crisis, these volunteers dropped
everything to help our country,” Boehler said in a statement. “This is
not a partisan issue, this is an American one, and I am proud of these
patriots.”
Navy Rear Adm. John Polowczyk, who is heading FEMA’s supply -chain task
force, was similarly effusive, saying in a statement that the task
force’s initial mission was to “find more product around the globe to
buy time to increase domestic production,” and that the volunteers were
critical in that effort.
Philip Rucker contributed to this report.
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