Jared Kushner is best known for his failures, and his decision to commandeer the supply chain task force and turn it into an arm of Big Business may be his greatest.
The supply chain task force, a part of the larger coronavirus task force, should be helping the federal government procure desperately-needed personal protective equipment (PPE) including face masks and shields, along with life-saving medical equipment like ventilators, at a lower cost, and distributing it to the areas that need it the most.
But under Kushner’s manipulation, the supply chain task force has “virtually no accountability,” NBC News reports. It has “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.”
“Jared and his friends decided they were going to do their thing,” one senior government official told NBC News. “It cost weeks.”
Congressional officials warn the supply chain group is mired in “chaos, secrecy and ineptitude.”
NBC reports under Kushner the supply chain task force has spent about one million dollars each on 40 chartered FedEx flights in a deal for chemical giant DuPont to send its made in the USA Tyvek material over to Vietnam, where it is sown into body suits.
Those suits used to sell for $5 each. The federal government, in addition to basically donating what would amount to $40 million to DuPont, is now paying up to three times as much for the suits: $15 each, NBC News reports. To make matters worse, instead of paying FedEx $1 million per flight the federal government could have used U.S. military aircraft which would have cost less than half: $410,000 per flight.
And if all that weren’t bad enough, DuPont only sold 60 percent of the suits to the federal government.
“We actually helped get raw materials supplied from Richmond, Virginia, and we flew that s— to Vietnam, all so that DuPont could sell us” their products, said a senior federal official involved in the coronavirus effort.
President Donald Trump and HHS, which announced the deal last week, described the arrangement as one in a string of massive successes in delivering badly needed medical equipment into the U.S. in an expedited fashion.
Read the entire report here.