Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) called on Trump this week to name a senior military officer to lead the manufacture and distribution of supplies. He sent three names to the White House and called Trump, Pence and chief of staff Mark Meadows to discuss the issue.
“This is a massive undertaking, and the country needs an undisputed person who is organizing all facets of it, someone with experience, someone with strength, someone who will have the full authority of the president behind them,” Schumer said.
Over in the House, Homeland Security Chairman Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) and Oversight Chairwoman Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.) sent a letter to FEMA inquiring about the agency’s faltering efforts on supplies.
Hospitals are so desperate for supplies they are taking protective masks from auto-body shops and nail salons. They’re also reusing masks, face shields and gowns, while simultaneously limiting interaction with patients, according to a report by the Health and Human Services Department’s inspector general, the agency’s independent in-house watchdog.
“One of the biggest challenges for local units of government is the fact that we haven’t had a comprehensive and coherent effort at the federal level in both the stockpile and distribution of this equipment,” said Toni Preckwinkle, county board president of Cook County, Ill., which includes Chicago.
The White House has repeatedly defended its supply distribution process. Trump repeatedly notes that a military officer is, indeed, in charge of logistics — Navy Rear Adm. John Polowczyk, vice director of logistics at the Joint Chiefs of Staff. And White House aides say the federal government is able to swiftly assess needs at a county-by-county level.
At FEMA, officials say they are working as fast as possible and have already completed 26 flights from overseas factories to the U.S., delivering 250.6 million gloves, 25.1 million surgical masks and 3.5 million gowns, among other items. An additional 54 flights are planned.
Once the supplies are in the country, the agency directs 50 percent of the load on each plane to high-risk areas, as determined by FEMA and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, a FEMA official said. The remaining half is left for distributors to fill previous orders.
“The system that we have in place is one that is essentially infusing our major distribution networks with millions of items,” Pence said. “And then FEMA is directing, on a day-by-day and oftentimes hour-by-hour basis, where those resources are most needed.”
At the outset of the crisis, Trump followed a decade-old federal disaster response playbook for a flu epidemic that put states in charge of initial response, said Craig Fugate, a former FEMA administrator who oversaw the playbook’s development early in the Obama administration.
Under the plan, HHS would send ventilators and other medical gear from the two-decade-old strategic national stockpile to states that ran short, while FEMA would be limited to “direct federal assistance,” such as building emergency hospitals and distributing food, water and other supplies. But as the coronavirus outbreak worsened in early March, the stockpile began to dwindle. Governors and Congress pressured the federal government to take a more active role and tap FEMA to play a greater role.
For weeks, Trump was reluctant. He was wary of declaring a national emergency and putting FEMA in charge, worried about generating public and economic panic. But on March 13, Trump relented, though he never mentioned FEMA in his announcement. His decision came seven weeks after the first U.S. case and days after the coronavirus was declared a global pandemic.
“Even after that emergency declaration was made, FEMA still really wasn’t in charge,” said a former Trump administration official. “For some number of days, FEMA was supporting HHS. And then it became clear that wasn’t working, so the president then announced FEMA is in charge.”
But it was hard to swiftly overhaul the structures that had been created in the initial months of the outbreak.
“You can’t just flip a switch and say ‘FEMA, go fix it,’” the ex-official added. “There were so many decisions that had been made in the prior months that would be hard for FEMA to immediately address, and one of those was the fact that the national stockpile that HHS manages was nearly empty or running low.”
In mid-March, Kushner was brought in, assembling a kitchen cabinet of outside experts to help increase the production and distribution of supplies. Polowczyk didn’t come on board until March 20, three weeks ago.
Source: politico.com
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