Re:Operation Warp Speed: A new model for industrial policy
by HWR_14 on Monday January 31, 2022 @12:30AM
(#30144887)
The "outside the process" was worse than you remember. Kushner got an bunch of MBA recent grads in a room to coordinate getting supplies. But they had no clue what they were doing. One CEO wrote about he spent about a month trying to get a federally guaranteed order so the bank would loan him the cash to run his mask factory on three shifts. Or maybe the details of that are fuzzy in my head and slightly off. But he eventually wrote into the Washington Post about trying to get the government to take his damn masks and, because there was an extra bureaucratic group running things, it was impossible to find the person who could say yes.
And it was even worse than denying states gear unless their governor kissed Trumps ring. He actively encouraged a bidding war. Oh, and then he tried to confiscate PPE the states bought so he could redistribute it to political ally's states. It lead to ridiculously news stories about how state troopers in NY and MD were hiding trucks of PPE from the dead.
> outside of the normal departments
Why is it superior to do it outside 'normal departments'? The CDC is the leading organization in the world for dealing with disease outbreaks and has handled them worldwide. The administration-appointed leadership didn't do well, and then was undermined by political appointees and the White House, who interfered with decisions and communication, in part to prevent any bad news or anything that contradicted Trump's misinformation.
My understanding from the time was that Kushner was a disaster - in part due to being someone with no experience getting a tryout in a generational crisis - and that they created the outside organization to funnel funds to their friends, many of whom got contracts and were completely incompetent. As I understand it, what we got was despite Trump administration, not because of them.
Edit: Also, part of Trump's solution was to pressure and outspend others to acquire vaccines from European companies, in a horrible zero-sum struggle.
> To stand up an organization like this outside of the normal departments and to give it the political backing it needed.
That's easy to do. What is hard is making it effective.
> distribution logistics problems
Distribution was a disaster. Remember in January 2021 the Trump administration was promising a large supply of vaccines that didn't actually exist, and in fact nobody knew how many vaccines we had.
Despite nine months or more of time to prepare, no national vaccine tracking infrastructure was ready. Individual counties were trying to develop and deploy their own, of course with terrible results.
Also, Trump was denying distribution to states whose governors didn't praise him - he actually blackmailed California's governor (and others), requiring them to publicly praise him in order to receive vaccines.
These are just the things I remember off the top of my head.