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Epic Fail: A Planning Fiasco [1]
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Date: 2025-01-04
Second of Five posts.
In January 2022, Musings of a Nobody ran a series of posts about the Trump administration’s historic failure in its handling of the coronavirus as detailed in a report from theHouse Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis.
As we approach Trump’s inauguration, we’re running the series again. The goal is to remind people of the corrupt, politically driven mismanagement that led to hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths and the accompanying financial crisis, to serve as a warning of the type of administration we may be seeing during the next four years, and to illustrate the kind of damage and suffering that it’s corruption and incompetence is capable of creating.
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Despite urgent warnings about the looming pandemic, the Trump administration failed to implement a national strategy to combat the pandemic and alleviate critical supply shortages, contributing to countless American lives lost, according to a report from the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis.
These devastating shortages could have been mitigated, but the Trump administration, despite knowing the significant risk posed by the coronavirus, failed to plan and execute an effective supply strategy, the report explained.
Here are some examples:
*On Feb. 21, 2020, then-WhiteHouse Office of Trade and Manufacturing Policy Director Peter Navarro wrote a memorandum to then-President Donald Trump in which he warned that the country was facing “a very serious public health emergency” and recommended “industrial mobilization of supply chains,” while emphasizing that the administration’s“movement is NOT fast enough.”
*In the weeks that followed,Trump continued to downplay the virus and refused to mobilize a coordinated response to procure supplies, even as the nation faced overrun hospitals andcritical shortages.
*No one from the federal government contacted some of the largest diagnostic companies operating in theUnited States until early March 2020 -- more than a month after a public health emergency had been declared in the United States in response to the coronavirus outbreak.
*One official said “key areas, like scaling up PPE (personal protective equipment) and getting our arms around the supply chain and protecting the health care system and so forth, it didn’t get sufficient attention” during the initial response. The official emphasized that “a smoother, more effective leadership and policy environment would have been helpful” during the initial months of the response.
*Instead of heeding warning sand implementing a comprehensive response strategy, the Trump administration pursued a haphazard and ineffective approach to procuring PPE and other desperately-needed supplies.
*White House officials pushed federal agencies to issue hundreds of millions of dollars in non-competitive coronavirus response contracts, often without adequate due diligence.
*Navarro told an executive from AirBoss Defense Group to “trust your government and begin to execute” on a $96 million proposal to supply powered respirators and filters -- even though Navarro lacked the authority to award federal contracts.
*Navarro and other White House officials successfully pushed for a $812 million no-bid contract to Phlow Corporation – a first-time government contractor newly formed at the start oft he pandemic.
*Navarro also may have bypassed procurement processes to steer supply contracts to particular contractors. At the same time, Dr. Steven Hatfill, a Navarro advisor, may have declined leads to purchase supplies like N95 masks in the spring of 2020 solely because the products were not manufactured in the United States. These refusals may have further exacerbated shortages of lifesaving PPE.
*Several large contracts for pandemic supplies were canceled by the federal government for non-performance, raising further questions about how the Trump administration’s failure to conduct adequate diligence hindered the government’s ability to promptly secure vital supplies.
*Multimillion-dollarPPE contracts were awarded to Federal Government Experts, but the company failed to deliver the PPE promised and ultimately didn’t receive any taxpayer dollars. This was despite at least a dozen federal officials being actively engaged in negotiating and overseeing the management of these contracts for about 10 weeks, wasting valuable time and resources that could have been spent working with suppliers who had the ability to procure vital PPE.
*The Trump administration’s failure to implement a coordinated national strategy to alleviate supply shortages forced federal agencies to enter risky contracts with unproven suppliers and pay above-market prices in order to compete for limited supplies on the open market. These factors substantially increased the risk of fraud, waste, and abuse of taxpayer resources.
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