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.