![]() The administration left companies to figure out where the most urgent needs were on their own. ![]() The administration also offered no industry-wide guidance for companies that weren’t part of Project Airbridge “aside from everyone watching the news,” FEMA officials told the committee. Despite the urgency, the administration put no meaningful restrictions on the prices private companies could charge for the supplies flown in on subsidized flights, nor did it require them to report back to the government what they charged for the goods. Yet in a briefing with committee staff, FEMA officials confirmed that the Trump administration had no involvement in directing PPE supplies within hotspots.Īt the time Project Airbridge got off the ground, states, local hospitals, and governments were bidding against each other and driving up the prices of scarce PPE exponentially. Project Airbridge provided at least $91 million worth of cargo flights to some of the nation’s biggest medical supply companies such as McKesson, Cardinal Health and Henry Schein on the condition that the companies sell 50 percent of the supplies to virus hotspots around the country as directed by the administration.Supply company executives warned the administration that the country needed to come up with a long-term solution as they projected that the supply chain issues would persist well into the winter flu season.As Trump said in mid-March, “We’re not a shipping clerk.” But the administration inexplicably refused to become the primary purchaser, despite many meetings and request s for such a government intervention. The nation’s biggest medical supply companies had begged the administration to take a bigger federal role in purchasing PPE as far back as January, as their internal projections showed early on that PPE demand would quickly outpace the available supply.Project Airbridge delivered only about 7 percent of the PPE supplies distributed in the country since the beginning of the pandemic.The Oversight committee’s report penetrated some of that opacity with a number of revelations from private industry that show how inadequate the administration’s response has been from the very beginning of the pandemic. “However, the administration’s implementation of Project Airbridge has been completely opaque.” “The novelty and complexity of this arrangement demands heightened scrutiny and transparency,” they wrote in a letter. On April 21, 10 Democratic senators, led by Elizabeth Warren, asked the inspector general of the Department of Health and Human Services to investigate the project. “Committee staff contacted these companies because the Trump Administration has not been transparent about the actions of the Task Force or Project Airbridge,” writes Chairwoman Carolyn Maloney (D-NY).įter many glowing PR hits, the administration decided to put an end to Project Airbridge as members of Congress and the media started demanding answers about how the supplies were being distributed, who received them, and whether the White House was making distribution decisions based on politics rather than public health. Over the past several months, the committee interviewed executives at the nation’s largest medical supply companies and their trade organization, HIDA, about Project Airbridge and the White House Supply Chain Task Force, largely because members could not get any information out of the administration. New information released today by the House Committee on Oversight and Reform provides a more detailed look at the administration’s response to the pandemic-related medical supply shortages. Various administration officials have touted Project Airbridge as an example of the administration’s quick response to the supply shortages, but critics complained that despite at least $91 million worth of subsidized cargo flights for big corporations, it was little more than a PR effort that never made a meaningful dent in the PPE shortage. The effort, spearheaded by Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, provided taxpayer funded cargo flights from Asia to expedite the delivery of PPE by private companies in the US. Check out our most recent coverage of the coronavirus crisis, and subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily newsletter.Įarlier this spring, when the country was facing massive shortages of personal protective equipment and other medical supplies needed to combat the novel coronavirus pandemic, the Trump administration announced with great fanfare something called Project Airbridge. The coronavirus is a rapidly developing news story, so some of the content in this article might be out of date.
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