States were supposed to team up on reopening. It hasn’t gone as planned.
By ANNA GRONEWOLD
When seven northeastern states announced they would reopen their virus-shuttered economies in lockstep when the time was right, it was seen as a very-public flexing of local government muscle when Washington was trying to push responsibility onto individual states.
But it turns out that the politics of reopening still very much recognize state lines.
Four weeks later, it’s clear that a single set of marching orders is out of the question, even for small co-dependent states with porous borders. When it comes to how and when to reopen their economies, the collaborative approach is giving way to the individual needs of the coalition's seven members.
The idea, prompted by New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, seemed simple and logical: The virus, as Cuomo said repeatedly, knows no borders. And so recovery ought to be borderless as well, so that one state's reopening didn't conflict with another's continued lockdown.
The same has been true elsewhere as states in the West, Midwest and South that announced their own reopening compacts aren’t having any better results from their agreements, which were never as ambitious as the plans laid out by Cuomo.
Closing was the easy part, Cuomo said. The next phase figures to be tougher. “Reopening," he said, "is more of an art form.”
In the Northeast, coordination proved difficult on the critical issue of school closing. On Friday, Cuomo ordered New York’s schools to remain shut through the end of the year — a proclamation made without similar announcements from neighboring Connecticut and New Jersey, despite holding off for weeks in hopes of ensuring tri-state coordination.
New Jersey and Connecticut knew the decision was coming, two officials involved in the talks said, but they were unable to come to consensus with their local education officials before Cuomo’s self-imposed deadline. Murphy closed his state's schools the following Monday, and Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont is expected to follow suit in the coming days.
Meanwhile, Lamont said on Thursday that Connecticut would begin reopening a swath of businesses after May 20 — nail and hair salons, retail, and outdoor areas for bars, restaurants, museums and zoos.
Cuomo has said New York will consider allowing work to resume in certain manufacturing and construction industries in parts of the state on May 15. Restaurants and arts and entertainment venues will be among the last sectors to reopen in full, he said Monday.
Murphy has laid out a series of steps to contain infection rates for reopening, but has otherwise said decisions will be made on a rolling basis according to whether residents behave like “knuckleheads.”
Executive staff from the offices of multiple governors told POLITICO that they are in daily text, email and phone communication with their counterparts, an unheard-of arrangement during normal times. And the seven Northeast states — New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Pennsylvania and Delaware — announced Sunday that they would purchase medical supplies collectively to avoid competing with each other in the global marketplace.
That collaborative spirit, however, has been hard to conjure in other aspects of the regional restart.
“The problem we have with the regional compact is, if everyone's going to make their own decision, what’s the compact?” said New Jersey Senate President Steve Sweeney, a Democrat, in an interview. “From a distance, it doesn’t look like there is [a compact].”
A regional approach, Cuomo said when he introduced the concept, was essential not just for the restart but for pooling data on the virus. It would be, he said, “a cooperative effort where we learn from each other and share information.”
Just a few hours after the Northeast alliance was announced, the three West Coast states said they would form a coalition of their own, with the same goal in mind — collaborative decision making and coordinated reopenings. President Donald Trump’s assertion shortly thereafter that he had "‘total authority" to decide when states should re-open seemed to prompt another round of coalition-building. The West Coast alliance broadened, new regional pacts were formed in the South and Midwest, and the outlines of a state-led collaborative approach to recovery seemed to be taking shape.
John Yoo, a University of California at Berkeley law professor and former official in the George W. Bush administration, said the regional alliances reflected states’ frustrations with the Trump administration. Yoo said the states were telling Trump, “We have so little confidence in you, we’re going to go ahead and fight for ourselves.”
But in the Northeast, at least, it may be easier to spot the differences than the similarities in the states' approaches.
Public beaches up and down the Atlantic Coast have closed on various time lines. New York City does yet not have a plan to open. But in Delaware and Massachusetts, state-run coasts are open for “passive recreational activities that only involve transitory movement” and “solitary beach fishing,” although most parking areas are closed.
Golf courses and marinas — now aligned in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut — have opened and closed on various time lines.
A widespread testing and tracing effort — financed in part by former New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg — has been announced for New Jersey, Connecticut and New York to help restart New York City’s commuter-dependent economy. But there is no similar plan for Philadelphia, which attracts workers from Delaware and New Jersey in addition to Pennsylvania.
In New York, Cuomo said on April 29 that hospitals in 35 upstate counties could resume elective surgeries, but not those in the more heavily populated downstate region. Those procedures are on hold in New Jersey, but are being carried out in Philadelphia, a discrepancy that hasn’t gone unnoticed by antsy politicians.
Variations on that theme are playing out across the country.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom has described his state's pact with Oregon, Washington, Nevada and Colorado as a matter of sharing infection data and other on-the-ground facts. Newsom said he collaborated with his Washington and Oregon counterparts on allowing elective surgeries to resume in the Golden State and incorporated their counsel into his reopening framework.
Monitoring cross-border traffic — which Nevada Gov. Steve Sisolak cited in discussing out-of-state visitors to Las Vegas — has not yet been discussed, Newsom said, although it’s possible they will eventually develop “some heads-up, some coordination” at some point.
But even as Newsom seeks a unified front with neighboring states, he’s been unable to get settled on a coordinated approach to California’s own reopening. Simmering frustration is flaring into open revolt in counties that have recorded far fewer cases than stricken urban centers, with some local leaders defying the state by forging ahead on their own reopening courses. On Monday, Newsom extended an olive branch by saying counties would assume more autonomy.
“Many of these counties, many of these regions have done already a ton of work in this space and they’re ready to go, and so I have great expectation that you’re going to see a lot of these communities with local certification in place,” he said.
That’s a concern shared by the Midwestern states’ alliance — where places like Illinois and Ohio took early, dramatic action to curb the coronavirus. But the bigger issues involved neighboring states that are not part of the Midwest collaboration: Iowa, where a stay-home order was never issued, and Missouri, which declared one two weeks after Illinois, but saw a large outbreak in St. Louis.
Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker said health officials are “keeping a very close eye” on Illinois counties that border St. Louis, but has not looked to stop people from traveling.
The Southern collaboration seems to be even more informal, and has had no known meetings or discussions about shared objectives.
It was announced by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis on April 20, but none of the other state governors — representing Georgia, South Carolina, Tennessee, Mississippi and Alabama — have acknowledged it, talked about it publicly or responded to questions about the group’s logistics. DeSantis last week began phase one of reopening Florida’s economy, giving no indication that there was any input from other southern states.
To be sure, the pacts aren’t meant to be entirely uniform. Cuomo said as much during a briefing on April 25.
The goal in the Northeast, he said, is to avoid a rush out of one state and into another for a service.
“People have cars and people are mobile and people are being cooped up,” Cuomo said. “And whatever you do you could trigger a reaction in that tri-state area. And you could see people across that tri-state area come to your region because you are now the place that I can get a haircut. You are now the place that I can walk down Main Street and I can get an ice cream cone and have the kids go in and shop.”
Melissa DeRosa, Cuomo’s top aide, said discussions about regional approaches emphasize border areas between states.
“We’re working towards trying to come to a consensus on principles, but there is an acknowledgment within the states that everyone is going to be on their own time line,” she said. “The major goal is to not undermine one anothers’ success in dealing with the infection rates within the states.”
The metrics by which each state can time their reopenings vary and they depend on the procurement of highly sought-after medical resources. Businesses will need to be able to protect their employees when they return and hospitals will need to be prepared for a second wave of patients, Cuomo has said.
There had been some preliminary discussion about sharing resources like tests, but that doesn’t seem to be happening.
New Jersey officials last month said that a Rutgers University-developed saliva test that’s been held out as a possible “gold standard” for mass testing will be prioritized for New Jersey residents first. Cuomo — who said he secured capacity for 40,000 combined diagnostic and antibody tests a day from Trump — hasn’t given any specifics on the extent to which his state health department will share its antibody test with neighbors.
Officials from the offices of several governors stressed that the pact is nonbinding, more of a brainstorming vehicle than anything.
That sort of informal communication is something states are already doing with or without a partnership announcement, said a spokesperson for Vermont Gov. Phil Scott, who has not joined the Northeast coalition despite fluid borders with both New York and Massachusetts.
“When looking at a regional restart strategy, it’s important to recognize Vermont took more aggressive mitigation measures than some of our surrounding states and has seen a positive impact from those measures,” Scott’s communications director Rebecca Kelley said in an email. “Because there is such a variance in the restrictions in place, it is difficult to align regional reopenings. But the Governor agrees it is critical to communicate as a region and Vermont has been doing so.”
Informal agreements among states happen all the time, said Bridget Fahey, a Sharswood Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania’s Cary Law School who researches federalism. The high visibility of the recent binge of alliance-building is perhaps more telling than their actual content, she said. That doesn’t mean they don’t serve a useful purpose — for example, they can be effective in persuading residents that their individual governor isn’t the only one making controversial public health decisions.
But they have also served as a messaging mechanism, because states can rarely enter into a binding agreement without federal approval, said Yoo, the former Bush official.
“If they actually required states to do something, they would be an unconstitutional compact,” he said. “They always have more of a symbolic aspect to them.”
And there might even be another bit of symbolism at work as well, or so Yoo suggested.
“I don’t think the symbolism was pressuring the federal government,” he said. “It was more like giving the middle finger to the federal government.”
May 05, 2020
Testing debacle
How a 96-hour project helped Trump's team reverse its testing debacle
Public-private partnership sees some results, but can it produce enough Covid-19 tests to reopen the country?
By DAN DIAMOND
Fifty-two days ago, the president vowed to a worried nation: Coronavirus testing is finally coming, and you won’t even have to leave your car.
“The goal is for individuals to be able to drive up and be swabbed,” President Donald Trump said in an address in the Rose Garden on March 13, previewing a network of drive-thru tests in places like Walmart parking lots. “We have many, many locations behind us, by the way,” Trump added. “Stores in virtually every location.”
Trump’s remarks thrilled public health experts, who had been terrified that Covid-19 was silently spreading with no way to easily detect it. The United States had completed a mere 20,000 total tests by that day, they estimated, even as South Korea — which had already launched its own drive-thru testing network — had tested nearly 250,000 people for the coronavirus. But excitement quickly turned to disappointment, as the administration's promised drive-thru sites were limited to a handful of locations in 10 states and the rollout was far from seamless; local officials received just a fraction of the test kits they were expecting.
The Community-Based Testing Site program would end up serving just 116,234 people in its first month, according to an internal tracker obtained by POLITICO. State officials and public health experts lamented the missed opportunity to test more people and slow the virus’ spread. The episode has been held up as a prime example of the White House’s unrealistic coronavirus proclamations, like the president’s March 6 pledge that “anybody that wants a test can get a test” — a promise that remains unfulfilled nearly two months later.
Yet inside the administration, and among its retail partners, the drive-thru effort has been viewed quite differently: as a successful prototype. The team that assembled the drive-thru initiative in about 96 hours — a coalition of administration technocrats, career civil servants and private-sector volunteers who were rapidly thrown together the day before Trump’s Rose Garden remarks — has become the heart of White House efforts to conquer the all-consuming problem of producing enough tests to safely reopen the economy this month.
That unorthodox team, assembled by White House senior adviser Jared Kushner, has achieved real progress: They’ve revamped medical supply chains, solved ventilator shortages and then devised a Covid-19 testing plan that the White House announced last week. National testing numbers have surged from a meager 5,000 tests on the day the team was assembled to more than 300,000 tests conducted last Friday. Even the much-maligned drive-thru program has now expanded to more than 100 sites in 30 states.
Public health experts say the need remains far greater, but acknowledged the improvements. “I think the administration is at a C now because they’re at least meeting the needs in a pandemic,” said a former Trump administration official, noting that the Kushner team had inherited an F after the administration’s lab-testing strategy failed across February. “But they’re not an A or B yet because we’re not getting ahead of the problem.”
Kushner, whom the president tapped two months ago to join the coronavirus response, said his team’s private-public partnerships were intended to supplement the administration’s ongoing efforts in the face of a pandemic. “It just took extraordinary creativity, focus, speed and untraditional approaches to help create an effective response,” he said.
POLITICO spoke with more than 15 officials, volunteers, advisers and private-sector executives directly involved in the White House-backed effort, who described a sprint against time to transform the nation’s Covid-19 response — even as the U.S. outbreak remains among the worst in the world — and insisted that the work was apolitical and shielded from White House pressures.
Officials working with Kushner’s team argue that drive-thru testing taught them the limits of what they could accomplish overnight. “There were tradeoffs,” said one senior administration official. “In the first 48 hours, we calculated that if we ran the [drive-thru] sites full speed, we could burn through 80 percent of the strategic national stockpile of personal protective equipment just on testing.”
The true test of the team’s work awaits in May, as states reopen their economies and millions of Americans head back to work, even as public health officials warn of a “slow burn” of continued infections that could top 200,000 new cases per week and death projections jump as states rush to relax restrictions. In order to contain the ongoing outbreak, there needs to be sufficient surveillance to uncover possible cases — and the White House insists that its rescue effort has secured enough supplies for states to run 8 million diagnostic tests alone in May. There were only about 6 million total tests conducted between January and the end of April.
"We are working with governors to make sure they have all the testing they need to open up safely," Kushner said.
Dan Bartlett, who runs corporate affairs for Walmart, was cautiously optimistic: “It’s definitely been a well-intentioned process that is complicated, and it’s taken time to find its footing,” he said. The retail giant launched two pilot testing sites in the Chicago area within 10 days of Trump’s remarks; now Walmart is up to more than 40 sites and aiming to scale to more than 100 sites by the end of May, Bartlett said.
Like some of its initiatives, the team behind it has been misunderstood and scorned, largely because of the involvement of one person: Kushner, the president’s son-in-law. Democrats have seized on Kushner’s role, clamoring for investigations and warning that the team may have inappropriately leaned on private sector volunteers.
“I don’t remember any Democrats saying it's terrible the private sector is helping save Obamacare,” countered conservative policy analyst Avik Roy, adding that key members of Kushner’s team — like Medicare innovation chief Brad Smith, U.S. foreign-investment czar Adam Boehler and Flatiron Health’s Nat Turner — have proven track records as health care entrepreneurs.
“I think they've made a huge difference,” Roy added. “You take a bunch of dedicated government officials … [and] layer on to that Adam, Brad and Nat are exceptionally talented and capable. You have the workings of a group that can actually move mountains.”
A coronavirus rescue team
That progress began late on March 11, where for the first time Trump appeared to grapple with the nation’s spreading coronavirus outbreak, after weeks of minimizing the risk.
“We are marshalling the full power of the federal government and the private sector to protect the American people,” the president said in a rare Oval Office address to the nation. “This is the most aggressive and comprehensive effort to confront a foreign virus in modern history.”
The president’s remarks were filled with glitches about new travel restrictions — reflecting the rushed pivot to address the virus’ severe threat — and they were partially scripted by Kushner, who off-camera was beginning to pull together the private sector efforts that Trump had just promised. By the next morning, he had recruited his longtime friend Boehler, an entrepreneur who first joined the administration’s health department in 2018 before shifting to a role last year overseeing U.S. investment in developing countries.
In a meeting at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building next to the White House, Kushner, Boehler, national security official Matt Pottinger, Trump policy aide Chris Liddell and other staff walked through the state of the nation's response. Kushner and Boehler then conferred on four key priorities, including the possibility of launching drive-thru testing sites modeled on South Korea’s popular model.
Smith, the newly installed head of Medicare’s innovation center, hadn’t been involved in the Covid-19 efforts to that point. (In fact, having just joined the Trump administration in January, Smith was still learning the many acronyms associated with his job and getting acquainted with his team, which was holding a meeting on social determinants of health that morning.) But Boehler — who had spent months recruiting Smith to the administration, convincing his one-time private sector competitor to walk away from a business startup — summoned him to the White House, where Smith was tapped to be the operations manager for the fledgling coronavirus rescue effort. The two health care entrepreneurs and dozens of other staff soon crowded into the Office of American Innovation, housed in the basement of the West Wing, as Kushner rounded through the office and laid out instructions.
Calls were quickly placed to retailers like Walmart to enlist their support and services, and to Obama administration veterans like Andy Slavitt, who’d helped lead the team to fix the broken HealthCare.gov website six years ago and became an outside adviser to the new group.
Meanwhile, Brett Giroir, a top Trump appointee in the health department, was tapped as the nation’s new testing coordinator — an overdue move to address the badly broken response. Giroir, who had been acting head of the Food and Drug Administration in late 2019, had spent recent days at the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, trying to uncover what had gone wrong after the agency’s troubled efforts to produce a coronavirus test. Those stints at FDA and CDC would help him understand the regulatory environment to speed tests to market, Giroir would tell colleagues.
A focus on drive-thru sites
By the morning of March 13, the new team had settled on the drive-thru testing project as its first priority, only a few hours before Trump would make the announcement in the Rose Garden.
But they faced several practical challenges, including one major operational problem: “No one in the government had ever set up something like a drive-thru testing site before,” said Smith. “It turned out that actually doing that was pretty hard.”
The team’s leaders turned to members of the Commissioned Corps — the nation’s uniformed public health team, who work under the Surgeon General — who had recently returned from coronavirus-infested cruise ships in order to figure out the potential workflow of how testing would even work. Across the weekend, the team determined what testing materials and personal protective equipment each drive-thru site would need — and after discovering that the strategic national stockpile only had about half the necessary supplies, conducted its own efforts to locate and acquire them.
Meanwhile, the Kushner team was working to convince retailers to allow them to set up drive-thru sites in their parking lots — a terrifying notion for some executives, worried about the perception of being Covid-19 hubs and the potential risks to their other customers, several executives acknowledged to POLITICO.
“You could imagine all the reasons not to do it. And the lawyers were arguing that case,” said Boehler. “And at one point [Walmart CEO] Doug McMillon said if ‘we’re not going to step up, who’s going to do it?’” Boehler added. “Everything switched at that moment.”
By Tuesday, four days after Trump’s remarks, test kits and other supplies were finding their way to partners in states – though the breathless and chaotic process seemed designed more to meet the White House's announced timeline than test people on a large scale. Seattle officials said they were initially promised 10,000 test kits and staff support from federal agencies, but as the administration's offers changed rapidly from day to day, ended up with only 4,000 kits and local officials had to staff the sites themselves.
“We always appreciate testing supplies. We put a number of them to use,” said Casey Katims, the federal liaison for Washington state. “We were grateful for that. But logistically there were challenges.”
The drive-thru plan would be symbolic of the challenges the team would face. The Community-Based Testing Site program, as it’s known inside the White House, did help several hard-hit cities like New Orleans get a handle on their emerging coronavirus infections — but the drive-thru program only led to tens of thousands of tests per week, generally limited to at-risk populations like first responders or the elderly, and not the nationally accessible program that many Americans were led to believe Trump was creating.
Meanwhile, some federal health department officials not involved in the effort saw it as a Band-Aid on the much larger problem of coronavirus testing shortages. “This was like a PR project cooked up so Trump could have something to tout,” said one official in the health department, whose team was also working to address the Covid-19 crisis and worried that the drive-thru plan was sapping focus from longer-term initiatives.
But the top officials who worked on it, like Boehler and Smith, experienced it as a crash course in the intricacies of Covid-19 testing and described it as akin to their experiences standing up new businesses.
Retailers have echoed the Trump administration line. For instance, Walmart’s Bartlett said that the giant retailer’s two pilot sites in March provided a real-time learning lab, teaching Walmart how to position the sites and its own personnel, figure out how many supplies are needed — even how to deal with complex interplay of local, state and federal regulations, like what to do with the biowaste generated by the testing.
While Walmart’s initial drive-through sites needed as many as 15 staff per location, its sites now require as few as two or three staff. The retailer last week launched mobile testing units too.
CVS, which launched its own pilot site in Massachusetts on March 19, says the public-private partnership prepared it for the massive rollout of self-swabbing tests it’s aiming to make available in up to 1,000 stores this month.
“Our team worked around the clock to open a test site six days after the Rose Garden announcement, then used those learnings – and newly-available technology – to change our strategy and dramatically increase testing capacity,” spokesperson T.J. Crawford said. The company is now moving toward a goal of performing up to 1.5 million tests per month on its own.
Overhauling supply lines
The team’s operations swiftly shifted to the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s squat headquarters on March 19 and began focusing on supply-chain overhauls, such as developing the “Project Airbridge” supply-flights to rapidly bring tens of millions of medical supplies from overseas into the United States, rather than waiting for the products to be shipped by sea, and working to encourage private-sector companies to spin up production of ventilators and other devices.
Team members said that the stakes felt especially dire, as doctors in Italy were reporting shortages that were forcing them to ration ventilators, and New York Governor Andrew Cuomo was insisting that his state needed tens of thousands of ventilators in order to avoid a similar fate.
“You really felt the impact of the work we were doing,” said one team member. “We were making decisions where it felt like hundreds or thousands of lives were at stake.”
That supply work would become even more politically sensitive as the White House battled with states over its role in procurement, and Trump sought to position the federal government as a “backup” to local officials.
“We don’t need a backup. We need a Tom Brady,” Washington Gov. Jay Inslee told Trump on a March 26 conference call with governors. The widely publicized comment, which Trump later addressed in a press briefing, was focused on Inslee’s concerns about a shortage of coronavirus testing swabs in Washington state, said one person with knowledge of the call. Giroir and other officials reached out after Inslee’s complaint, but more than a month later, Washington state officials warn they still have concerns about swab shortages.
“We’ve been disappointed by how slowly the administration has come to the realization that supplies are the key problems with testing,” said Katims, the Washington state liaison. “It spoke to a misunderstanding of where the lab challenges are.”
Other governors decided to take the supply issue into their own hands. Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan and his wife, a native Korean speaker, on March 28 began a dialogue with South Korean officials to acquire hundreds of thousands of tests for his state, a spokesman for Hogan said. The test kits arrived three weeks later — and Hogan had them flown to a Baltimore-area airport and protected by the National Guard, fearing that federal officials would find a way to confiscate them.
Faced with angry governors, administration officials said the rescue team was making a rational choice: it was impossible for the federal government to be the national supplier. “There was an initial reticence to own the issue federally because the capacity was at the state and local level, and we didn’t initially have the federal resources to meet demand,” said an administration official with insight into the plan. “No matter how well you did, we also knew it was never going to be considered good enough.”
Meanwhile, the Kushner team began to draw attention as a “shadow task force,” unfavorably compared to the televised briefings that Trump and his key deputies gave from the White House every day. One watchdog, the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, warned that the group’s use of “private email accounts with no assurance their communications are being preserved” appeared to violate federal records laws.
Democratic skepticism about the group hardened, as members of Congress looked for possible financial conflicts and focused intently on the role of Kushner.
“Our first concern is that Jared Kushner — President Donald Trump’s son-in-law and senior advisor — has been managing a ‘shadow task force’ of key government officials and private sector actors tasked with coordinating the private sector response,” Democratic senators Elizabeth Warren, Tom Carper and Richard Blumenthal wrote last month to the White House’s top ethics official. The Democrat-led House Oversight Committee also has looked into the role of roughly two-dozen volunteers from cancer-technology firm Flatiron Health, private-equity firm Welsh, Carson, Anderson & Stowe, and investment fund Insight Partners.
The growing intense spotlight unsettled some team members, who worried that the role of the private sector volunteers — who some officials had flagged to the media for using personal emails — had been overblown. “They had nothing to do with contracting, and they’d leave the room anytime there was a sensitive conversation,” said one person with knowledge of team operations. Overall, the private-sector volunteers accounted for just 10 percent of all people working on the team’s efforts, estimated two team leaders, who said the volunteers’ work largely focused on analysis and sourcing calls. The team instead was mostly staffed by officials at FEMA, HHS and the White House, including some of Boehler and Smith's own deputies, as well as dozens of federal contractors.
The harsh scrutiny also rankled White House officials, who worry it’s putting politics over public health. “In the face of this unprecedented crisis, these volunteers dropped everything to help our country,” said Boehler. “I’m proud of them.”
“It wasn’t a shadow task force,” Kushner said, adding that he was on the White House’s coronavirus task force led by Vice President Mike Pence, who encouraged him to coordinate innovation efforts between the White House and the health department. “I think people have made this with more mystique than it actually has.”
An April-long push for more testing
At the end of March, Trump had extended the White House’s social-distancing guidelines through the end of April, which team members took as a signal: be prepared for the economy to re-open by May.
“We knew there was a good chance that we’d need to get a lot more testing capacity online in May,” said one official involved in the team’s preparations. “But unlike the drive-thru project, where we had a few days, we had weeks of runway to plan for it.”
Team members on April 1 began working to identify total lab-testing capacity, interviewing dozens of companies to develop projections for how much diagnostic testing would be coming online. The group also met with outside experts like Scott Gottlieb, Trump’s former FDA commissioner who had outlined a plan for re-opening the economy that depended on having sufficient testing available.
A new testing task force then kicked off on Monday April 6, with White House coronavirus coordinator Deborah Birx soon joining the effort to provide more clinical expertise, and team members began reaching out to a slew of firms to identify and source potential products. For instance, U.S. Cotton changed production of its existing Q-tip swabs at an Ohio factory into a swab that could be used for specialized Covid-19 testing, with the coronavirus rescue team working with the FDA to speedily win permission to use the devices.
Officials said that the earlier drive-thru project also laid key groundwork by establishing ties with firms that would be relied on again, such as lab equipment company Thermo Fisher, which can perform mass amounts of automated testing.
“Had we not done that work, there’s no way we would’ve ramped as fast as we did” on the April projects, said Smith. “I don't think we would have that momentum with the manufacturers and with the retailers.”
By the week of April 13, the team had briefed Kushner and Chief of Staff Mark Meadows: the federal government could acquire enough supplies to ensure that states could conduct 8 million Covid-19 tests in May, at the time more than double the 4 million tests that had been cumulatively performed. The team also had drawn up state-by-state lists of unused testing capacity that they believed would allow local officials to multiply the number of tests they performed.
The plan was then brought in front of Trump himself on the afternoon of April 20 — who liked it so much that he asked Smith to present it on national TV at the White House press briefing, less than an hour later. Smith frantically dashed to Kushner’s office to work on his remarks, where he would stress that states needed to take advantage of their existing lab-testing machines.
But the announcements, and the state-by-state list of lab capacity in particular, rankled some governors, who said they needed more supplies immediately — and not instructions from Washington on how to use their lab equipment.
“This does nothing to answer the repeated calls from governors to address the lack of swabs, viral transport media, reagents, and other supplies and personnel needed to take advantage of that lab capacity,” Inslee wrote to Vice President Mike Pence on April 21.
Looking forward
On April 27, the collection of retailers and suppliers from the March 13 drive-thru announcement had returned to the Rose Garden, where Trump touted the work by his rescue team and took a victory lap.
“We’ve launched the most ambitious testing effort … on Earth,” the president said, noting that the nation’s sheer number of Covid-19 tests has well outpaced other countries, although on a per capita basis, the United States still lags behind peers like Canada and Germany.
Some executives agreed with him, noting that more drive-thru sites, use of mass testing machines and even at-home testing options are set to expand in May.
“I think you’re going to see far fewer bigger, centralized testing locations that are trying to accommodate hundreds, if not thousands of people,” Walmart’s Bartlett said, adding that the national effort will shift “to more massly distributed locations that are handling dozens of tests per day that’s just much more ubiquitous.”
The Kushner team officials also said they have been conducting weekly calls since April 22 to discuss each state’s testing goals, and Giroir has told states that the team will be shipping them weekly pallets intended to meet their needs.
State and local officials remain skeptical, saying the White House effort has continued to disappoint them as they lack crucial supplies and continue to face shortages, months after the first Covid-19 cases were detected.
“It seems too good to be true,” said one state official. “After weeks of begging and begging that they’ll finally get all the swabs, now they will?”
“Last week, we needed between 20,000 and 30,000 test kits. We only could get 5,000,” added Patty Hayes, the public health director of Seattle and King County, Washington — the epicenter of the nation’s first outbreak in February.
“It’s been an incredible roller-coaster,” Hayes added. “Promises are made — and then the story changes. To not get our partners’ hopes up, we work on a weekly basis.”
On the coronavirus rescue team, there’s a mood of quiet confidence that they’ve set the nation up for what should be a massive surge in testing across May — one that could exceed the stated goal of 8 million tests this month, if governors fully engage the lab-testing capacity they’ve identified. A key recommendation from the White House: that states use an instrument produced by Thermo Fisher known as a KingFisher, which helps automate part of the process needed to test patients' samples for Covid-19. The team has had conversations with governors about the devices in recent days, with many officials learning about the existence of the equipment in their states for the first time.
“Getting to those bigger numbers is really about the governors, and whether they are going to ramp up the machines in their state to full capacity,” said Smith.
Smith acknowledged that he’d never heard of “Thermo Fisher” or “KingFisher” machines before beginning his coronavirus recovery team — part of the surreal experience of the past two months that's forced him and other officials to become overnight experts on nucleic acids, lab-testing plates and other terminology relevant to fighting the Covid-19 outbreak.
Team leaders also said they regret that the private-sector volunteers who pitched in on the rescue effort — regardless of politics or circumstances — have been so closely scrutinized, politically attacked and investigated.
“Everybody was proud to raise their hand to help,” said one person who helped coordinate a volunteer effort back in March. “I just want everyone to raise their hand next time too.”
Public-private partnership sees some results, but can it produce enough Covid-19 tests to reopen the country?
By DAN DIAMOND
Fifty-two days ago, the president vowed to a worried nation: Coronavirus testing is finally coming, and you won’t even have to leave your car.
“The goal is for individuals to be able to drive up and be swabbed,” President Donald Trump said in an address in the Rose Garden on March 13, previewing a network of drive-thru tests in places like Walmart parking lots. “We have many, many locations behind us, by the way,” Trump added. “Stores in virtually every location.”
Trump’s remarks thrilled public health experts, who had been terrified that Covid-19 was silently spreading with no way to easily detect it. The United States had completed a mere 20,000 total tests by that day, they estimated, even as South Korea — which had already launched its own drive-thru testing network — had tested nearly 250,000 people for the coronavirus. But excitement quickly turned to disappointment, as the administration's promised drive-thru sites were limited to a handful of locations in 10 states and the rollout was far from seamless; local officials received just a fraction of the test kits they were expecting.
The Community-Based Testing Site program would end up serving just 116,234 people in its first month, according to an internal tracker obtained by POLITICO. State officials and public health experts lamented the missed opportunity to test more people and slow the virus’ spread. The episode has been held up as a prime example of the White House’s unrealistic coronavirus proclamations, like the president’s March 6 pledge that “anybody that wants a test can get a test” — a promise that remains unfulfilled nearly two months later.
Yet inside the administration, and among its retail partners, the drive-thru effort has been viewed quite differently: as a successful prototype. The team that assembled the drive-thru initiative in about 96 hours — a coalition of administration technocrats, career civil servants and private-sector volunteers who were rapidly thrown together the day before Trump’s Rose Garden remarks — has become the heart of White House efforts to conquer the all-consuming problem of producing enough tests to safely reopen the economy this month.
That unorthodox team, assembled by White House senior adviser Jared Kushner, has achieved real progress: They’ve revamped medical supply chains, solved ventilator shortages and then devised a Covid-19 testing plan that the White House announced last week. National testing numbers have surged from a meager 5,000 tests on the day the team was assembled to more than 300,000 tests conducted last Friday. Even the much-maligned drive-thru program has now expanded to more than 100 sites in 30 states.
Public health experts say the need remains far greater, but acknowledged the improvements. “I think the administration is at a C now because they’re at least meeting the needs in a pandemic,” said a former Trump administration official, noting that the Kushner team had inherited an F after the administration’s lab-testing strategy failed across February. “But they’re not an A or B yet because we’re not getting ahead of the problem.”
Kushner, whom the president tapped two months ago to join the coronavirus response, said his team’s private-public partnerships were intended to supplement the administration’s ongoing efforts in the face of a pandemic. “It just took extraordinary creativity, focus, speed and untraditional approaches to help create an effective response,” he said.
POLITICO spoke with more than 15 officials, volunteers, advisers and private-sector executives directly involved in the White House-backed effort, who described a sprint against time to transform the nation’s Covid-19 response — even as the U.S. outbreak remains among the worst in the world — and insisted that the work was apolitical and shielded from White House pressures.
Officials working with Kushner’s team argue that drive-thru testing taught them the limits of what they could accomplish overnight. “There were tradeoffs,” said one senior administration official. “In the first 48 hours, we calculated that if we ran the [drive-thru] sites full speed, we could burn through 80 percent of the strategic national stockpile of personal protective equipment just on testing.”
The true test of the team’s work awaits in May, as states reopen their economies and millions of Americans head back to work, even as public health officials warn of a “slow burn” of continued infections that could top 200,000 new cases per week and death projections jump as states rush to relax restrictions. In order to contain the ongoing outbreak, there needs to be sufficient surveillance to uncover possible cases — and the White House insists that its rescue effort has secured enough supplies for states to run 8 million diagnostic tests alone in May. There were only about 6 million total tests conducted between January and the end of April.
"We are working with governors to make sure they have all the testing they need to open up safely," Kushner said.
Dan Bartlett, who runs corporate affairs for Walmart, was cautiously optimistic: “It’s definitely been a well-intentioned process that is complicated, and it’s taken time to find its footing,” he said. The retail giant launched two pilot testing sites in the Chicago area within 10 days of Trump’s remarks; now Walmart is up to more than 40 sites and aiming to scale to more than 100 sites by the end of May, Bartlett said.
Like some of its initiatives, the team behind it has been misunderstood and scorned, largely because of the involvement of one person: Kushner, the president’s son-in-law. Democrats have seized on Kushner’s role, clamoring for investigations and warning that the team may have inappropriately leaned on private sector volunteers.
“I don’t remember any Democrats saying it's terrible the private sector is helping save Obamacare,” countered conservative policy analyst Avik Roy, adding that key members of Kushner’s team — like Medicare innovation chief Brad Smith, U.S. foreign-investment czar Adam Boehler and Flatiron Health’s Nat Turner — have proven track records as health care entrepreneurs.
“I think they've made a huge difference,” Roy added. “You take a bunch of dedicated government officials … [and] layer on to that Adam, Brad and Nat are exceptionally talented and capable. You have the workings of a group that can actually move mountains.”
A coronavirus rescue team
That progress began late on March 11, where for the first time Trump appeared to grapple with the nation’s spreading coronavirus outbreak, after weeks of minimizing the risk.
“We are marshalling the full power of the federal government and the private sector to protect the American people,” the president said in a rare Oval Office address to the nation. “This is the most aggressive and comprehensive effort to confront a foreign virus in modern history.”
The president’s remarks were filled with glitches about new travel restrictions — reflecting the rushed pivot to address the virus’ severe threat — and they were partially scripted by Kushner, who off-camera was beginning to pull together the private sector efforts that Trump had just promised. By the next morning, he had recruited his longtime friend Boehler, an entrepreneur who first joined the administration’s health department in 2018 before shifting to a role last year overseeing U.S. investment in developing countries.
In a meeting at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building next to the White House, Kushner, Boehler, national security official Matt Pottinger, Trump policy aide Chris Liddell and other staff walked through the state of the nation's response. Kushner and Boehler then conferred on four key priorities, including the possibility of launching drive-thru testing sites modeled on South Korea’s popular model.
Smith, the newly installed head of Medicare’s innovation center, hadn’t been involved in the Covid-19 efforts to that point. (In fact, having just joined the Trump administration in January, Smith was still learning the many acronyms associated with his job and getting acquainted with his team, which was holding a meeting on social determinants of health that morning.) But Boehler — who had spent months recruiting Smith to the administration, convincing his one-time private sector competitor to walk away from a business startup — summoned him to the White House, where Smith was tapped to be the operations manager for the fledgling coronavirus rescue effort. The two health care entrepreneurs and dozens of other staff soon crowded into the Office of American Innovation, housed in the basement of the West Wing, as Kushner rounded through the office and laid out instructions.
Calls were quickly placed to retailers like Walmart to enlist their support and services, and to Obama administration veterans like Andy Slavitt, who’d helped lead the team to fix the broken HealthCare.gov website six years ago and became an outside adviser to the new group.
Meanwhile, Brett Giroir, a top Trump appointee in the health department, was tapped as the nation’s new testing coordinator — an overdue move to address the badly broken response. Giroir, who had been acting head of the Food and Drug Administration in late 2019, had spent recent days at the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, trying to uncover what had gone wrong after the agency’s troubled efforts to produce a coronavirus test. Those stints at FDA and CDC would help him understand the regulatory environment to speed tests to market, Giroir would tell colleagues.
A focus on drive-thru sites
By the morning of March 13, the new team had settled on the drive-thru testing project as its first priority, only a few hours before Trump would make the announcement in the Rose Garden.
But they faced several practical challenges, including one major operational problem: “No one in the government had ever set up something like a drive-thru testing site before,” said Smith. “It turned out that actually doing that was pretty hard.”
The team’s leaders turned to members of the Commissioned Corps — the nation’s uniformed public health team, who work under the Surgeon General — who had recently returned from coronavirus-infested cruise ships in order to figure out the potential workflow of how testing would even work. Across the weekend, the team determined what testing materials and personal protective equipment each drive-thru site would need — and after discovering that the strategic national stockpile only had about half the necessary supplies, conducted its own efforts to locate and acquire them.
Meanwhile, the Kushner team was working to convince retailers to allow them to set up drive-thru sites in their parking lots — a terrifying notion for some executives, worried about the perception of being Covid-19 hubs and the potential risks to their other customers, several executives acknowledged to POLITICO.
“You could imagine all the reasons not to do it. And the lawyers were arguing that case,” said Boehler. “And at one point [Walmart CEO] Doug McMillon said if ‘we’re not going to step up, who’s going to do it?’” Boehler added. “Everything switched at that moment.”
By Tuesday, four days after Trump’s remarks, test kits and other supplies were finding their way to partners in states – though the breathless and chaotic process seemed designed more to meet the White House's announced timeline than test people on a large scale. Seattle officials said they were initially promised 10,000 test kits and staff support from federal agencies, but as the administration's offers changed rapidly from day to day, ended up with only 4,000 kits and local officials had to staff the sites themselves.
“We always appreciate testing supplies. We put a number of them to use,” said Casey Katims, the federal liaison for Washington state. “We were grateful for that. But logistically there were challenges.”
The drive-thru plan would be symbolic of the challenges the team would face. The Community-Based Testing Site program, as it’s known inside the White House, did help several hard-hit cities like New Orleans get a handle on their emerging coronavirus infections — but the drive-thru program only led to tens of thousands of tests per week, generally limited to at-risk populations like first responders or the elderly, and not the nationally accessible program that many Americans were led to believe Trump was creating.
Meanwhile, some federal health department officials not involved in the effort saw it as a Band-Aid on the much larger problem of coronavirus testing shortages. “This was like a PR project cooked up so Trump could have something to tout,” said one official in the health department, whose team was also working to address the Covid-19 crisis and worried that the drive-thru plan was sapping focus from longer-term initiatives.
But the top officials who worked on it, like Boehler and Smith, experienced it as a crash course in the intricacies of Covid-19 testing and described it as akin to their experiences standing up new businesses.
Retailers have echoed the Trump administration line. For instance, Walmart’s Bartlett said that the giant retailer’s two pilot sites in March provided a real-time learning lab, teaching Walmart how to position the sites and its own personnel, figure out how many supplies are needed — even how to deal with complex interplay of local, state and federal regulations, like what to do with the biowaste generated by the testing.
While Walmart’s initial drive-through sites needed as many as 15 staff per location, its sites now require as few as two or three staff. The retailer last week launched mobile testing units too.
CVS, which launched its own pilot site in Massachusetts on March 19, says the public-private partnership prepared it for the massive rollout of self-swabbing tests it’s aiming to make available in up to 1,000 stores this month.
“Our team worked around the clock to open a test site six days after the Rose Garden announcement, then used those learnings – and newly-available technology – to change our strategy and dramatically increase testing capacity,” spokesperson T.J. Crawford said. The company is now moving toward a goal of performing up to 1.5 million tests per month on its own.
Overhauling supply lines
The team’s operations swiftly shifted to the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s squat headquarters on March 19 and began focusing on supply-chain overhauls, such as developing the “Project Airbridge” supply-flights to rapidly bring tens of millions of medical supplies from overseas into the United States, rather than waiting for the products to be shipped by sea, and working to encourage private-sector companies to spin up production of ventilators and other devices.
Team members said that the stakes felt especially dire, as doctors in Italy were reporting shortages that were forcing them to ration ventilators, and New York Governor Andrew Cuomo was insisting that his state needed tens of thousands of ventilators in order to avoid a similar fate.
“You really felt the impact of the work we were doing,” said one team member. “We were making decisions where it felt like hundreds or thousands of lives were at stake.”
That supply work would become even more politically sensitive as the White House battled with states over its role in procurement, and Trump sought to position the federal government as a “backup” to local officials.
“We don’t need a backup. We need a Tom Brady,” Washington Gov. Jay Inslee told Trump on a March 26 conference call with governors. The widely publicized comment, which Trump later addressed in a press briefing, was focused on Inslee’s concerns about a shortage of coronavirus testing swabs in Washington state, said one person with knowledge of the call. Giroir and other officials reached out after Inslee’s complaint, but more than a month later, Washington state officials warn they still have concerns about swab shortages.
“We’ve been disappointed by how slowly the administration has come to the realization that supplies are the key problems with testing,” said Katims, the Washington state liaison. “It spoke to a misunderstanding of where the lab challenges are.”
Other governors decided to take the supply issue into their own hands. Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan and his wife, a native Korean speaker, on March 28 began a dialogue with South Korean officials to acquire hundreds of thousands of tests for his state, a spokesman for Hogan said. The test kits arrived three weeks later — and Hogan had them flown to a Baltimore-area airport and protected by the National Guard, fearing that federal officials would find a way to confiscate them.
Faced with angry governors, administration officials said the rescue team was making a rational choice: it was impossible for the federal government to be the national supplier. “There was an initial reticence to own the issue federally because the capacity was at the state and local level, and we didn’t initially have the federal resources to meet demand,” said an administration official with insight into the plan. “No matter how well you did, we also knew it was never going to be considered good enough.”
Meanwhile, the Kushner team began to draw attention as a “shadow task force,” unfavorably compared to the televised briefings that Trump and his key deputies gave from the White House every day. One watchdog, the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, warned that the group’s use of “private email accounts with no assurance their communications are being preserved” appeared to violate federal records laws.
Democratic skepticism about the group hardened, as members of Congress looked for possible financial conflicts and focused intently on the role of Kushner.
“Our first concern is that Jared Kushner — President Donald Trump’s son-in-law and senior advisor — has been managing a ‘shadow task force’ of key government officials and private sector actors tasked with coordinating the private sector response,” Democratic senators Elizabeth Warren, Tom Carper and Richard Blumenthal wrote last month to the White House’s top ethics official. The Democrat-led House Oversight Committee also has looked into the role of roughly two-dozen volunteers from cancer-technology firm Flatiron Health, private-equity firm Welsh, Carson, Anderson & Stowe, and investment fund Insight Partners.
The growing intense spotlight unsettled some team members, who worried that the role of the private sector volunteers — who some officials had flagged to the media for using personal emails — had been overblown. “They had nothing to do with contracting, and they’d leave the room anytime there was a sensitive conversation,” said one person with knowledge of team operations. Overall, the private-sector volunteers accounted for just 10 percent of all people working on the team’s efforts, estimated two team leaders, who said the volunteers’ work largely focused on analysis and sourcing calls. The team instead was mostly staffed by officials at FEMA, HHS and the White House, including some of Boehler and Smith's own deputies, as well as dozens of federal contractors.
The harsh scrutiny also rankled White House officials, who worry it’s putting politics over public health. “In the face of this unprecedented crisis, these volunteers dropped everything to help our country,” said Boehler. “I’m proud of them.”
“It wasn’t a shadow task force,” Kushner said, adding that he was on the White House’s coronavirus task force led by Vice President Mike Pence, who encouraged him to coordinate innovation efforts between the White House and the health department. “I think people have made this with more mystique than it actually has.”
An April-long push for more testing
At the end of March, Trump had extended the White House’s social-distancing guidelines through the end of April, which team members took as a signal: be prepared for the economy to re-open by May.
“We knew there was a good chance that we’d need to get a lot more testing capacity online in May,” said one official involved in the team’s preparations. “But unlike the drive-thru project, where we had a few days, we had weeks of runway to plan for it.”
Team members on April 1 began working to identify total lab-testing capacity, interviewing dozens of companies to develop projections for how much diagnostic testing would be coming online. The group also met with outside experts like Scott Gottlieb, Trump’s former FDA commissioner who had outlined a plan for re-opening the economy that depended on having sufficient testing available.
A new testing task force then kicked off on Monday April 6, with White House coronavirus coordinator Deborah Birx soon joining the effort to provide more clinical expertise, and team members began reaching out to a slew of firms to identify and source potential products. For instance, U.S. Cotton changed production of its existing Q-tip swabs at an Ohio factory into a swab that could be used for specialized Covid-19 testing, with the coronavirus rescue team working with the FDA to speedily win permission to use the devices.
Officials said that the earlier drive-thru project also laid key groundwork by establishing ties with firms that would be relied on again, such as lab equipment company Thermo Fisher, which can perform mass amounts of automated testing.
“Had we not done that work, there’s no way we would’ve ramped as fast as we did” on the April projects, said Smith. “I don't think we would have that momentum with the manufacturers and with the retailers.”
By the week of April 13, the team had briefed Kushner and Chief of Staff Mark Meadows: the federal government could acquire enough supplies to ensure that states could conduct 8 million Covid-19 tests in May, at the time more than double the 4 million tests that had been cumulatively performed. The team also had drawn up state-by-state lists of unused testing capacity that they believed would allow local officials to multiply the number of tests they performed.
The plan was then brought in front of Trump himself on the afternoon of April 20 — who liked it so much that he asked Smith to present it on national TV at the White House press briefing, less than an hour later. Smith frantically dashed to Kushner’s office to work on his remarks, where he would stress that states needed to take advantage of their existing lab-testing machines.
But the announcements, and the state-by-state list of lab capacity in particular, rankled some governors, who said they needed more supplies immediately — and not instructions from Washington on how to use their lab equipment.
“This does nothing to answer the repeated calls from governors to address the lack of swabs, viral transport media, reagents, and other supplies and personnel needed to take advantage of that lab capacity,” Inslee wrote to Vice President Mike Pence on April 21.
Looking forward
On April 27, the collection of retailers and suppliers from the March 13 drive-thru announcement had returned to the Rose Garden, where Trump touted the work by his rescue team and took a victory lap.
“We’ve launched the most ambitious testing effort … on Earth,” the president said, noting that the nation’s sheer number of Covid-19 tests has well outpaced other countries, although on a per capita basis, the United States still lags behind peers like Canada and Germany.
Some executives agreed with him, noting that more drive-thru sites, use of mass testing machines and even at-home testing options are set to expand in May.
“I think you’re going to see far fewer bigger, centralized testing locations that are trying to accommodate hundreds, if not thousands of people,” Walmart’s Bartlett said, adding that the national effort will shift “to more massly distributed locations that are handling dozens of tests per day that’s just much more ubiquitous.”
The Kushner team officials also said they have been conducting weekly calls since April 22 to discuss each state’s testing goals, and Giroir has told states that the team will be shipping them weekly pallets intended to meet their needs.
State and local officials remain skeptical, saying the White House effort has continued to disappoint them as they lack crucial supplies and continue to face shortages, months after the first Covid-19 cases were detected.
“It seems too good to be true,” said one state official. “After weeks of begging and begging that they’ll finally get all the swabs, now they will?”
“Last week, we needed between 20,000 and 30,000 test kits. We only could get 5,000,” added Patty Hayes, the public health director of Seattle and King County, Washington — the epicenter of the nation’s first outbreak in February.
“It’s been an incredible roller-coaster,” Hayes added. “Promises are made — and then the story changes. To not get our partners’ hopes up, we work on a weekly basis.”
On the coronavirus rescue team, there’s a mood of quiet confidence that they’ve set the nation up for what should be a massive surge in testing across May — one that could exceed the stated goal of 8 million tests this month, if governors fully engage the lab-testing capacity they’ve identified. A key recommendation from the White House: that states use an instrument produced by Thermo Fisher known as a KingFisher, which helps automate part of the process needed to test patients' samples for Covid-19. The team has had conversations with governors about the devices in recent days, with many officials learning about the existence of the equipment in their states for the first time.
“Getting to those bigger numbers is really about the governors, and whether they are going to ramp up the machines in their state to full capacity,” said Smith.
Smith acknowledged that he’d never heard of “Thermo Fisher” or “KingFisher” machines before beginning his coronavirus recovery team — part of the surreal experience of the past two months that's forced him and other officials to become overnight experts on nucleic acids, lab-testing plates and other terminology relevant to fighting the Covid-19 outbreak.
Team leaders also said they regret that the private-sector volunteers who pitched in on the rescue effort — regardless of politics or circumstances — have been so closely scrutinized, politically attacked and investigated.
“Everybody was proud to raise their hand to help,” said one person who helped coordinate a volunteer effort back in March. “I just want everyone to raise their hand next time too.”
Lashes out
‘They’re all LOSERS’: Trump lashes out at conservative critics over new coronavirus ad
The ad apparently infuriated the president.
By QUINT FORGEY
President Donald Trump late Monday lashed out against a cadre of prominent conservatives seeking to thwart his reelection bid, a group that includes attorney George Conway — the husband of White House adviser, Kellyanne Conway.
The president's multi-tweet screed came in response to the latest anti-Trump advertisement released earlier Monday by The Lincoln Project, the super PAC launched last December by George Conway and a handful of other disaffected Republicans and former party members.
The ominous, minute-long spot — titled “Mourning in America,” a play on the famous 1984 campaign commercial and slogan of former President Ronald Reagan — savaged the Trump administration’s response to the coronavirus pandemic and questioned: “If we have another four years like this, will there even be an America?”
The ad apparently infuriated the president.
“A group of RINO Republicans who failed badly 12 years ago, then again 8 years ago, and then got BADLY beaten by me, a political first timer, 4 years ago, have copied (no imagination) the concept of an ad from Ronald Reagan, ‘Morning in America’, doing everything possible to get even for all of their many failures,” Trump wrote online just before midnight on Monday.
“You see, these loser types don’t care about 252 new Federal Judges, 2 great Supreme Court Justices, a rebuilt military, a protected 2nd Amendment, biggest EVER Tax & Regulation cuts, and much more,” the president continued.
Trump went on to assert that he “didn’t use any” of the group’s founders or affiliated advisers in his own presidential campaigns “because they don’t know how to win,” and argued that “their so-called Lincoln Project is a disgrace to Honest Abe.”
“I don’t know what Kellyanne did to her deranged loser of a husband, Moonface, but it must have been really bad,” Trump wrote of George Conway.
Trump also targeted political strategists John Weaver, who the president said “lost big” advising former Ohio Gov. John Kasich’s 2016 White House bid; “Crazed” Rick Wilson, who “lost for Evan ‘McMuffin’ McMullin,” a 2016 independent presidential candidate; and Steve Schmidt and Reed Galen, who both advised former Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.).
Lastly, the president homed in on Jennifer Horn, a former GOP congressional candidate in New Hampshire, whom Trump wrote was “thrown out” of the state’s Republican Party.
“They’re all LOSERS, but Abe Lincoln, Republican, is all smiles!” Trump concluded.
The ad apparently infuriated the president.
By QUINT FORGEY
President Donald Trump late Monday lashed out against a cadre of prominent conservatives seeking to thwart his reelection bid, a group that includes attorney George Conway — the husband of White House adviser, Kellyanne Conway.
The president's multi-tweet screed came in response to the latest anti-Trump advertisement released earlier Monday by The Lincoln Project, the super PAC launched last December by George Conway and a handful of other disaffected Republicans and former party members.
The ominous, minute-long spot — titled “Mourning in America,” a play on the famous 1984 campaign commercial and slogan of former President Ronald Reagan — savaged the Trump administration’s response to the coronavirus pandemic and questioned: “If we have another four years like this, will there even be an America?”
The ad apparently infuriated the president.
“A group of RINO Republicans who failed badly 12 years ago, then again 8 years ago, and then got BADLY beaten by me, a political first timer, 4 years ago, have copied (no imagination) the concept of an ad from Ronald Reagan, ‘Morning in America’, doing everything possible to get even for all of their many failures,” Trump wrote online just before midnight on Monday.
“You see, these loser types don’t care about 252 new Federal Judges, 2 great Supreme Court Justices, a rebuilt military, a protected 2nd Amendment, biggest EVER Tax & Regulation cuts, and much more,” the president continued.
Trump went on to assert that he “didn’t use any” of the group’s founders or affiliated advisers in his own presidential campaigns “because they don’t know how to win,” and argued that “their so-called Lincoln Project is a disgrace to Honest Abe.”
“I don’t know what Kellyanne did to her deranged loser of a husband, Moonface, but it must have been really bad,” Trump wrote of George Conway.
Trump also targeted political strategists John Weaver, who the president said “lost big” advising former Ohio Gov. John Kasich’s 2016 White House bid; “Crazed” Rick Wilson, who “lost for Evan ‘McMuffin’ McMullin,” a 2016 independent presidential candidate; and Steve Schmidt and Reed Galen, who both advised former Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.).
Lastly, the president homed in on Jennifer Horn, a former GOP congressional candidate in New Hampshire, whom Trump wrote was “thrown out” of the state’s Republican Party.
“They’re all LOSERS, but Abe Lincoln, Republican, is all smiles!” Trump concluded.
Another stooge....
Trump’s intel chief pick faces off against senators
John Ratcliffe, an ally of the president, is expected to face questions over his independence from the White House.
By ANDREW DESIDERIO and MARTIN MATISHAK
President Donald Trump’s pick to lead the nation’s 17 intelligence agencies faces off with senators Tuesday morning in a confirmation hearing expected to focus largely on independence from the White House, Russian election interference and the origins of the coronavirus pandemic.
Rep. John Ratcliffe (R-Texas), a steadfast ally of the president, is expected to face a grilling session before the Senate Intelligence Committee as he vies to become the director of national intelligence amid an unprecedented global health crisis and ahead of the 2020 presidential election, which national security officials have long warned will be a prime target for interference from foreign adversaries like Russia.
Ratcliffe has relatively little experience working in the intelligence field, though he has served on the House Intelligence Committee for more than a year. Trump initially chose him for the post last year, but Ratcliffe withdrew from consideration just days later amid questions about whether he embellished aspects of his resume from his time as a U.S. attorney in Texas. He was first elected to the House in 2014.
In addition to Ratcliffe’s qualifications, the hearing is expected to focus extensively on the committee’s recent conclusions about Russia’s interference in the 2016 election — namely, that the Kremlin’s malign activities were carried out with the intention of boosting Trump’s candidacy.
That conclusion contradicts the House intelligence panel’s 2018 report which disputed the idea that Moscow interfered with the goal of helping Trump. The president himself has also rejected that assessment.
The Texas Republican will also likely be questioned about the origins of the coronavirus. Last week the Office of the Director of National Intelligence took the unusual step of issuing a public statement acknowledging that the clandestine community continues to “rigorously examine” whether the outbreak “began through contact with infected animals or if it was the result of an accident at a laboratory in Wuhan,” the city in China where the virus was initially identified.
Trump undercut the statement hours later when he claimed he had seen evidence that gave him a “high degree of confidence” that the coronavirus originated from the lab, though he declined to offer details.
Ratcliffe gained national prominence last year during the House’s hearing with former special counsel Robert Mueller, in addition to the impeachment inquiry. Ratcliffe endeared himself to the president after grilling Mueller on a host of issues, and he continued that streak during the impeachment investigation, using his perch on the Intelligence and Judiciary committees to fiercely defend the president against Democrats’ charges of abuse of power and obstruction of Congress.
If he is confirmed to the post, Ratcliffe would replace another Trump ally, Richard Grenell, atop the nation’s intelligence apparatus. Grenell has drawn the ire of congressional Democrats over his fiery personality and his reputation as a GOP political operative.
Trump appointed Grenell in an acting capacity after forcing out the previous acting director, Joseph Maguire, after learning that Maguire had authorized congressional briefings on Russia’s efforts to interfere in the 2020 campaign.
Republican senators have been eager to install a permanent nominee to lead the intelligence community, and several of them have commented favorably about Ratcliffe’s qualifications.
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence was created in the aftermath of the 9/11 terror attacks.
As lawmakers try to observe social-distancing during the Senate’s first week back in Washington in more than a month, the hearing room will be largely empty and just a few senators will be present at any given time.
John Ratcliffe, an ally of the president, is expected to face questions over his independence from the White House.
By ANDREW DESIDERIO and MARTIN MATISHAK
President Donald Trump’s pick to lead the nation’s 17 intelligence agencies faces off with senators Tuesday morning in a confirmation hearing expected to focus largely on independence from the White House, Russian election interference and the origins of the coronavirus pandemic.
Rep. John Ratcliffe (R-Texas), a steadfast ally of the president, is expected to face a grilling session before the Senate Intelligence Committee as he vies to become the director of national intelligence amid an unprecedented global health crisis and ahead of the 2020 presidential election, which national security officials have long warned will be a prime target for interference from foreign adversaries like Russia.
Ratcliffe has relatively little experience working in the intelligence field, though he has served on the House Intelligence Committee for more than a year. Trump initially chose him for the post last year, but Ratcliffe withdrew from consideration just days later amid questions about whether he embellished aspects of his resume from his time as a U.S. attorney in Texas. He was first elected to the House in 2014.
In addition to Ratcliffe’s qualifications, the hearing is expected to focus extensively on the committee’s recent conclusions about Russia’s interference in the 2016 election — namely, that the Kremlin’s malign activities were carried out with the intention of boosting Trump’s candidacy.
That conclusion contradicts the House intelligence panel’s 2018 report which disputed the idea that Moscow interfered with the goal of helping Trump. The president himself has also rejected that assessment.
The Texas Republican will also likely be questioned about the origins of the coronavirus. Last week the Office of the Director of National Intelligence took the unusual step of issuing a public statement acknowledging that the clandestine community continues to “rigorously examine” whether the outbreak “began through contact with infected animals or if it was the result of an accident at a laboratory in Wuhan,” the city in China where the virus was initially identified.
Trump undercut the statement hours later when he claimed he had seen evidence that gave him a “high degree of confidence” that the coronavirus originated from the lab, though he declined to offer details.
Ratcliffe gained national prominence last year during the House’s hearing with former special counsel Robert Mueller, in addition to the impeachment inquiry. Ratcliffe endeared himself to the president after grilling Mueller on a host of issues, and he continued that streak during the impeachment investigation, using his perch on the Intelligence and Judiciary committees to fiercely defend the president against Democrats’ charges of abuse of power and obstruction of Congress.
If he is confirmed to the post, Ratcliffe would replace another Trump ally, Richard Grenell, atop the nation’s intelligence apparatus. Grenell has drawn the ire of congressional Democrats over his fiery personality and his reputation as a GOP political operative.
Trump appointed Grenell in an acting capacity after forcing out the previous acting director, Joseph Maguire, after learning that Maguire had authorized congressional briefings on Russia’s efforts to interfere in the 2020 campaign.
Republican senators have been eager to install a permanent nominee to lead the intelligence community, and several of them have commented favorably about Ratcliffe’s qualifications.
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence was created in the aftermath of the 9/11 terror attacks.
As lawmakers try to observe social-distancing during the Senate’s first week back in Washington in more than a month, the hearing room will be largely empty and just a few senators will be present at any given time.
May 01, 2020
Messier 106
Sued for seizing student wages....
DeVos sued for seizing student loan borrowers' wages during pandemic
The lawsuit claims that the Education Department hasn’t actually halted the practice and is continuing to garnish wages in violation of the CARES Act.
By MICHAEL STRATFORD
Education Secretary Betsy DeVos is continuing to garnish the wages of federal student loan borrowers who fall behind on payments even though Congress suspended the practice in the economic rescue package, according to a new lawsuit.
An upstate New York woman who works as a home health aide for less than $13 an hour claimed in the lawsuit, filed late Thursday, that the federal government seized more than $70 from her paycheck as recently as last week — nearly a full month after President Donald Trump signed the CARES Act into law. She is suing on behalf of about 285,000 borrowers whose wages are being garnished, according to the lawsuit.
DeVos first announced in March that she would take administrative action to automatically stop the Education Department from seizing the wages —and tax refunds — of defaulted student loan borrowers for at least two months. Congress then included that policy in the CARES Act and extended it, prohibiting the Education Department from garnishing wages or tax refunds through Sept. 30.
But the proposed class action lawsuit claims that the Education Department hasn’t actually halted the practice and is continuing to garnish wages in violation of the CARES Act. It cites a Washington Post story that said the department had not sent formal letters to tell employers to stop withholding money from borrowers' paychecks on behalf of the government.
The department estimated some 285,000 people had their wages garnished between March 13 and March 26, according to The Post.
Education Department spokesperson Angela Morabito declined to comment directly on the pending litigation but said the department "has taken immediate action to notify employers to stop garnishing wages."
"The Department’s default loan servicer called employers by phone, sent emails when possible, and mailed letters to employers who could not be reached any other way," Morabito said in a statement. "Payments we receive via garnished wages will be immediately processed for refund, and the employer will be contacted again to ensure the guidance to stop garnishing wages is understood. The Department relies on employers to stop garnishing wages, but is taking every measure to contact employers and refund garnished wages to borrowers until Sept. 30, 2020."
Department officials have previously said they plan to refund all wages seized by the government since March 13, when Trump declared a national emergency because of the coronavirus pandemic. But the agency has not provided any timeline for when all of those refunds will occur.
The consumer advocacy groups that brought the lawsuit against DeVos on behalf of borrowers say the Education Department’s response has been woefully insufficient. The suit was filed in D.C. federal court by Student Defense and the National Consumer Law Center, and is being supported by the Student Borrower Protection Center.
“Returning the money several months from now is not acceptable,” said Persis Yu, who directs the National Consumer Law Center’s Student Loan Borrower Assistance Project. “We’re in a national crisis right now, and borrowers need that money right now, and Congress passed a law that said borrowers should keep that money right now.”
Yu said that borrowers who are subject to wage garnishment are already among the most vulnerable — even before the economic collapse caused by the pandemic.
“These are borrowers who were in distress on their loans already,” she said. “They’re the ones holding the bag with the department’s inability to get this done, whatever the department’s intentions are.”
Alex Elson, senior counsel at Student Defense, said that DeVos broke the promise she made to stop wage garnishments in March. “The truth is, she keeps on taking wages from the paychecks of Americans struggling to make ends meet,” he said in a statement. “We are suing to make her stop.”
The plaintiff in the lawsuit, Elizabeth Barber, 59, who lives in the Rochester area, defaulted on about $10,000 in federal student loans in December, according to the complaint. She earns about $12.89 per hour and made about $20,000 in 2019.
Since January, the government has garnished 12 percent from each of Barber’s paychecks, adding to her financial strain. She has seen a reduction in her weekly schedule as a home health aide by 10 to 15 hours per week because of the pandemic, according to the lawsuit.
“The funds that the Department has illegally garnished are essential to Ms. Barber’s ability to satisfy her essential financial obligations during the pandemic,” the complaint says, noting that she is struggling to pay for her housing as well as water and electric bills.
Barber’s wages were last garnished on April 24, according to the complaint, which also says “the garnishment order remains in effect” for her employer to seize a portion of her earnings and send them to the government.
The lawsuit comes after a group of Democrats, led by Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.) and Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.), said last month they’re concerned that the Education Department hasn’t fully carried out the requirement to stop wage garnishment. “This is simply unconscionable,” they wrote in an April 16 letter to DeVos.
The Education Department said at the time that, through its loan servicer, it had instructed the employers of more than 135,000 borrowers to stop garnishing wages — and planned to send letters to additional employers. “If the Department receives funds from a garnishment between March 13, 2020, and Sept. 30, 2020, the Department will refund — and has already started refunding — those garnished wages,” department spokesperson Angela Morabito said at the time.
Department officials also issued orders to the government's contracted debt collection agencies to stop garnishing wages in March, but the process is complicated by the fact that the government relies on employers to actually take out money from paychecks. The Education Department has previously claimed in court that it has no mechanism to force employers to stop garnishing wages after it has ordered them to start doing so.
“This raises bigger concerns about the wage garnishment process in general,” said Yu, the National Consumer Law Center attorney. “What does it mean that the government has this really incredible tool to garnish wages and they can’t turn it off?”
The lawsuit claims that the Education Department hasn’t actually halted the practice and is continuing to garnish wages in violation of the CARES Act.
By MICHAEL STRATFORD
Education Secretary Betsy DeVos is continuing to garnish the wages of federal student loan borrowers who fall behind on payments even though Congress suspended the practice in the economic rescue package, according to a new lawsuit.
An upstate New York woman who works as a home health aide for less than $13 an hour claimed in the lawsuit, filed late Thursday, that the federal government seized more than $70 from her paycheck as recently as last week — nearly a full month after President Donald Trump signed the CARES Act into law. She is suing on behalf of about 285,000 borrowers whose wages are being garnished, according to the lawsuit.
DeVos first announced in March that she would take administrative action to automatically stop the Education Department from seizing the wages —and tax refunds — of defaulted student loan borrowers for at least two months. Congress then included that policy in the CARES Act and extended it, prohibiting the Education Department from garnishing wages or tax refunds through Sept. 30.
But the proposed class action lawsuit claims that the Education Department hasn’t actually halted the practice and is continuing to garnish wages in violation of the CARES Act. It cites a Washington Post story that said the department had not sent formal letters to tell employers to stop withholding money from borrowers' paychecks on behalf of the government.
The department estimated some 285,000 people had their wages garnished between March 13 and March 26, according to The Post.
Education Department spokesperson Angela Morabito declined to comment directly on the pending litigation but said the department "has taken immediate action to notify employers to stop garnishing wages."
"The Department’s default loan servicer called employers by phone, sent emails when possible, and mailed letters to employers who could not be reached any other way," Morabito said in a statement. "Payments we receive via garnished wages will be immediately processed for refund, and the employer will be contacted again to ensure the guidance to stop garnishing wages is understood. The Department relies on employers to stop garnishing wages, but is taking every measure to contact employers and refund garnished wages to borrowers until Sept. 30, 2020."
Department officials have previously said they plan to refund all wages seized by the government since March 13, when Trump declared a national emergency because of the coronavirus pandemic. But the agency has not provided any timeline for when all of those refunds will occur.
The consumer advocacy groups that brought the lawsuit against DeVos on behalf of borrowers say the Education Department’s response has been woefully insufficient. The suit was filed in D.C. federal court by Student Defense and the National Consumer Law Center, and is being supported by the Student Borrower Protection Center.
“Returning the money several months from now is not acceptable,” said Persis Yu, who directs the National Consumer Law Center’s Student Loan Borrower Assistance Project. “We’re in a national crisis right now, and borrowers need that money right now, and Congress passed a law that said borrowers should keep that money right now.”
Yu said that borrowers who are subject to wage garnishment are already among the most vulnerable — even before the economic collapse caused by the pandemic.
“These are borrowers who were in distress on their loans already,” she said. “They’re the ones holding the bag with the department’s inability to get this done, whatever the department’s intentions are.”
Alex Elson, senior counsel at Student Defense, said that DeVos broke the promise she made to stop wage garnishments in March. “The truth is, she keeps on taking wages from the paychecks of Americans struggling to make ends meet,” he said in a statement. “We are suing to make her stop.”
The plaintiff in the lawsuit, Elizabeth Barber, 59, who lives in the Rochester area, defaulted on about $10,000 in federal student loans in December, according to the complaint. She earns about $12.89 per hour and made about $20,000 in 2019.
Since January, the government has garnished 12 percent from each of Barber’s paychecks, adding to her financial strain. She has seen a reduction in her weekly schedule as a home health aide by 10 to 15 hours per week because of the pandemic, according to the lawsuit.
“The funds that the Department has illegally garnished are essential to Ms. Barber’s ability to satisfy her essential financial obligations during the pandemic,” the complaint says, noting that she is struggling to pay for her housing as well as water and electric bills.
Barber’s wages were last garnished on April 24, according to the complaint, which also says “the garnishment order remains in effect” for her employer to seize a portion of her earnings and send them to the government.
The lawsuit comes after a group of Democrats, led by Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.) and Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.), said last month they’re concerned that the Education Department hasn’t fully carried out the requirement to stop wage garnishment. “This is simply unconscionable,” they wrote in an April 16 letter to DeVos.
The Education Department said at the time that, through its loan servicer, it had instructed the employers of more than 135,000 borrowers to stop garnishing wages — and planned to send letters to additional employers. “If the Department receives funds from a garnishment between March 13, 2020, and Sept. 30, 2020, the Department will refund — and has already started refunding — those garnished wages,” department spokesperson Angela Morabito said at the time.
Department officials also issued orders to the government's contracted debt collection agencies to stop garnishing wages in March, but the process is complicated by the fact that the government relies on employers to actually take out money from paychecks. The Education Department has previously claimed in court that it has no mechanism to force employers to stop garnishing wages after it has ordered them to start doing so.
“This raises bigger concerns about the wage garnishment process in general,” said Yu, the National Consumer Law Center attorney. “What does it mean that the government has this really incredible tool to garnish wages and they can’t turn it off?”
Relaunching her political operation
Klobuchar launches campaign to aid Senate, House Dems in 2020
The former presidential candidate is relaunching her political operation after dropping out of the 2020 race and endorsing Joe Biden.
By ELENA SCHNEIDER
Amy Klobuchar is kicking off her next act.
Two months after ending her presidential campaign and amid vice presidential speculation, the Minnesota Democrat is launching a new effort to help direct money and campaign help to down-ballot Democrats. The endeavor — called the Win Big Project, a play on one of Klobuchar’s 2020 campaign slogans — started on Friday by endorsing a slate of a dozen House and Senate candidates.
Klobuchar endorsed four Senate challengers: Cal Cunningham in North Carolina, Jamie Harrison in South Carolina, Mark Kelly in Arizona and Ben Ray Lujan in New Mexico. But she didn’t weigh in on any of the contested Democratic primaries coming up in June. She also backed three House challengers, including Dan Feehan, Jackie Gordon and Christy Smith.
“It’s not enough to just win back the White House and eke out a victory on Election Night,” said Justin Buoen, a senior adviser for Klobuchar and her former presidential campaign manager. “We need to win big so we can take back the U.S. Senate, keep the House and focus on an agenda and policies that will improve people’s lives. We can do that by electing Democrats in blue, purple, and red districts and states across the country.”
Klobuchar, who dropped out of the presidential primary and endorsed Joe Biden a day before Super Tuesday, is among the contenders being considered for Biden’s ticket. Her group — a joint effort of her PAC, Follow the North Star PAC, and her reelection committee, Klobuchar for Minnesota — joins a crowded collection of post-presidential campaign vehicles also aimed at growing the Democratic bench and its pipeline of candidates. Those include Pete Buttigieg’s Win The Era PAC and Kamala Harris’ Fearless For the People PAC.
Klobuchar also endorsed two senators running for reelection, Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.) and Sen. Tina Smith (D-Minn.), and three House members: Reps. Anthony Brindisi (D-N.Y.), Lizzie Fletcher (D-Texas) and Xochitl Torres Small (D-N.M.).
The former presidential candidate is relaunching her political operation after dropping out of the 2020 race and endorsing Joe Biden.
By ELENA SCHNEIDER
Amy Klobuchar is kicking off her next act.
Two months after ending her presidential campaign and amid vice presidential speculation, the Minnesota Democrat is launching a new effort to help direct money and campaign help to down-ballot Democrats. The endeavor — called the Win Big Project, a play on one of Klobuchar’s 2020 campaign slogans — started on Friday by endorsing a slate of a dozen House and Senate candidates.
Klobuchar endorsed four Senate challengers: Cal Cunningham in North Carolina, Jamie Harrison in South Carolina, Mark Kelly in Arizona and Ben Ray Lujan in New Mexico. But she didn’t weigh in on any of the contested Democratic primaries coming up in June. She also backed three House challengers, including Dan Feehan, Jackie Gordon and Christy Smith.
“It’s not enough to just win back the White House and eke out a victory on Election Night,” said Justin Buoen, a senior adviser for Klobuchar and her former presidential campaign manager. “We need to win big so we can take back the U.S. Senate, keep the House and focus on an agenda and policies that will improve people’s lives. We can do that by electing Democrats in blue, purple, and red districts and states across the country.”
Klobuchar, who dropped out of the presidential primary and endorsed Joe Biden a day before Super Tuesday, is among the contenders being considered for Biden’s ticket. Her group — a joint effort of her PAC, Follow the North Star PAC, and her reelection committee, Klobuchar for Minnesota — joins a crowded collection of post-presidential campaign vehicles also aimed at growing the Democratic bench and its pipeline of candidates. Those include Pete Buttigieg’s Win The Era PAC and Kamala Harris’ Fearless For the People PAC.
Klobuchar also endorsed two senators running for reelection, Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.) and Sen. Tina Smith (D-Minn.), and three House members: Reps. Anthony Brindisi (D-N.Y.), Lizzie Fletcher (D-Texas) and Xochitl Torres Small (D-N.M.).
Insane... Purely stupid and insane...
Wearing a mask is for smug liberals. Refusing to is for reckless Republicans.
Welcome to Washington's latest partisan standoff.
By RYAN LIZZA and DANIEL LIPPMAN
In the ‘60s, protesters burned bras. In 2020 they might soon be burning masks.
Views on how to respond to the coronavirus pandemic have become increasingly polarized, yet another political issue that for many culture war combatants is filtered through an ideological lens. The left has been almost uniformly — and loudly — in favor of sacrificing many personal liberties in exchange for containing the virus’s spread. The right has been divided, but the vocal activist wing of conservatism that has enormous influence on social media and Fox News, has been far more willing to attack the various infringements on where people can go and what they have to wear.
The mask has become the ultimate symbol of this new cultural and political divide.
For progressives, masks have become a sign that you take the pandemic seriously and are willing to make a personal sacrifice to save lives. Prominent people who don’t wear them are shamed and dragged on Twitter by lefty accounts. On the right, where the mask is often seen as the symbol of a purported overreaction to the coronavirus, mask promotion is a target of ridicule, a sign that in a deeply polarized America almost anything can be politicized and turned into a token of tribal affiliation.
The cleavage was made clear this week when Mike Pence toured the Mayo Clinic without wearing a mask. Pictures from the event showed the mask-less vice president surrounded by doctors and patients with face coverings. The story dominated cable news. Liberal hosts shamed Pence for setting a bad example or behaving recklessly. Conservatives attacked the left’s mask obsession as another example of the creeping nanny state.
Laura Ingraham warned that “social control over large populations is achieved through fear and intimidation and suppression of free thought” and “conditioning the public through propaganda is also key, new dogmas replace good old common sense.”
But the pro-mask voices won, at least for now. On Thursday, Pence toured a ventilator factory in Indiana while wearing a surgical mask.
In Washington, mask-wearing has become deeply political and inconsistent. The White House is divided along some familiar lines. In early April, when the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention first issued its recommendation that Americans wear “cloth face coverings” — because surgical masks are still in short supply — Trump immediately blurted out that he wasn’t interested.
“With the masks, it is going to be a voluntary thing,” Trump said at a White House briefing on April 3. “You can do it. You don’t have to do it. I am choosing not to do it. It may be good. It is only a recommendation, voluntary.”
The disagreement apparently extends to the first family. Melania Trump and Ivanka Trump occasionally like to send subtle hints when they differ with the president. Sure enough, soon after Trump said he wouldn’t be wearing a mask, both Melania and Ivanka posted pictures of themselves on social media promoting the virtues of covering your face. (Although Ivanka was chastised by some liberals for violating federal guidelines for non-essential travel when she went to New Jersey for Passover.)
Visiting the White House, it's striking how many people don’t wear masks. Very few Secret Service agents have them on. Some days, even the staff member performing temperature checks on reporters doesn’t wear one. In contrast, most, though certainly not all, members of the media wear some kind of face covering while in the press workspace or waiting to cover a presidential event. But very few keep them on during the televised briefings.
Inside the building it is a relatively mask-free zone. At one meeting this week that included chief of staff Mark Meadows and some 20 other White House officials, including Secret Service agents, nobody from the White House was wearing a mask or other face covering.
“It’s a personal choice. That's the whole point of the guidelines in the first place. If you want to wear one, you can wear one," said one White House official. "It's not a conscious effort to try and raise the alarm or not raise the alarm."
Another White House official emphasized that the CDC guidance is “voluntary” and that most staffers don’t cover their faces while at work. “I don't wear one when I'm here, but I take an Uber back and forth to work every day because the Metro and buses are so terrible right now. ... But when I’m here on complex, just sitting at my desk, in a meeting where there's plenty of distance, I don't wear one.”
There are a few exceptions in the West Wing. As POLITICO previously reported, Matthew Pottinger, the deputy national security adviser, has sometimes worn a mask. Maybe he knows something: his wife is a former CDC microbiologist.
The cleaning crews at the White House are another exception. “A ton of cleaners are always wearing a mask and there seems to be a lot more of them around,” said a third White House official, "especially in the West Wing.”
Face coverings are not usually for personal protection. Unless the mask has a filter, like an N95 mask, the CDC says it won’t offer protection from possibly inhaling the coronavirus. But in situations where social distancing is harder to do, like a workplace or grocery store, a mask reduces the ability of an asymptomatic infected person to spread the virus.
Pence argued that because he’s regularly tested, he wasn’t putting anyone at risk by not wearing a mask at the Mayo Clinic. The counterargument is that the clinic requires all visitors to wear a mask and that Pence’s nonchalance about the policy undercuts the public health campaign to encourage covering up.
But others took Pence’s maskless photo-op as a political statement. Perhaps it was a show of power and authority: I don’t have to wear a mask because I have access to regular testing. In that sense being in close proximity to people without covering your face is a kind of new status symbol for the pandemic era. Or perhaps it was a kind of dog whistle to the pro-Trump base that has been skeptical about the pandemic response.
The virtue signaling seems to have spilled over to Capitol Hill. During a vote on the latest coronavirus relief package last week, POLITICO reported that about a dozen Republicans declined to wear masks on the House floor. One of the maskless lawmakers, Chip Roy, a Republican from Texas, said he wasn’t making an ideological statement and that members were “spaced out” on the floor, precluding the need for covering his face.
When asked if it was a cultural or ideological statement, another maskless Republican, Ralph Abraham, a veterinarian turned family doctor from Louisiana, gave an emphatic “Nooo, nooo!”
Not all of the maskless behavior on the right seems ideological. Some members just seem to be struggling to adapt to new rules like everyone else. A POLITICO reporter spotted one masked Democratic member who actually removed his mask when he encountered a colleague, and they posed for a picture together.
But there is clearly a growing partisan split. Democratic leaders in the House have made more of a point about wearing masks on camera than Republican leaders. Democrat Jim Clyburn donned one at a press conference on Thursday with Nancy Pelosi, who generally uses a scarf. None of the top three House GOP leaders wore masks at an outdoor press conference at the Capitol last week.
The mask divide is spilling into policymaking. Congressional Democrats, backed by flight attendant unions, have been leading a campaign to force the use of masks on airplanes, which the Trump administration has resisted. (In the absence of a mandate, Delta, American, United, JetBlue, and Frontier have all recently adopted a mask policy for passengers.)
Some people seems as worked up about face coverings as others are about tax policy or abortion. In response to a recent POLITICO report about the Pence imbroglio, one person on Twitter wrote, “Get over it, I don’t wear a mask either and I NEVER WILL!”
Welcome to Washington's latest partisan standoff.
By RYAN LIZZA and DANIEL LIPPMAN
In the ‘60s, protesters burned bras. In 2020 they might soon be burning masks.
Views on how to respond to the coronavirus pandemic have become increasingly polarized, yet another political issue that for many culture war combatants is filtered through an ideological lens. The left has been almost uniformly — and loudly — in favor of sacrificing many personal liberties in exchange for containing the virus’s spread. The right has been divided, but the vocal activist wing of conservatism that has enormous influence on social media and Fox News, has been far more willing to attack the various infringements on where people can go and what they have to wear.
The mask has become the ultimate symbol of this new cultural and political divide.
For progressives, masks have become a sign that you take the pandemic seriously and are willing to make a personal sacrifice to save lives. Prominent people who don’t wear them are shamed and dragged on Twitter by lefty accounts. On the right, where the mask is often seen as the symbol of a purported overreaction to the coronavirus, mask promotion is a target of ridicule, a sign that in a deeply polarized America almost anything can be politicized and turned into a token of tribal affiliation.
The cleavage was made clear this week when Mike Pence toured the Mayo Clinic without wearing a mask. Pictures from the event showed the mask-less vice president surrounded by doctors and patients with face coverings. The story dominated cable news. Liberal hosts shamed Pence for setting a bad example or behaving recklessly. Conservatives attacked the left’s mask obsession as another example of the creeping nanny state.
Laura Ingraham warned that “social control over large populations is achieved through fear and intimidation and suppression of free thought” and “conditioning the public through propaganda is also key, new dogmas replace good old common sense.”
But the pro-mask voices won, at least for now. On Thursday, Pence toured a ventilator factory in Indiana while wearing a surgical mask.
In Washington, mask-wearing has become deeply political and inconsistent. The White House is divided along some familiar lines. In early April, when the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention first issued its recommendation that Americans wear “cloth face coverings” — because surgical masks are still in short supply — Trump immediately blurted out that he wasn’t interested.
“With the masks, it is going to be a voluntary thing,” Trump said at a White House briefing on April 3. “You can do it. You don’t have to do it. I am choosing not to do it. It may be good. It is only a recommendation, voluntary.”
The disagreement apparently extends to the first family. Melania Trump and Ivanka Trump occasionally like to send subtle hints when they differ with the president. Sure enough, soon after Trump said he wouldn’t be wearing a mask, both Melania and Ivanka posted pictures of themselves on social media promoting the virtues of covering your face. (Although Ivanka was chastised by some liberals for violating federal guidelines for non-essential travel when she went to New Jersey for Passover.)
Visiting the White House, it's striking how many people don’t wear masks. Very few Secret Service agents have them on. Some days, even the staff member performing temperature checks on reporters doesn’t wear one. In contrast, most, though certainly not all, members of the media wear some kind of face covering while in the press workspace or waiting to cover a presidential event. But very few keep them on during the televised briefings.
Inside the building it is a relatively mask-free zone. At one meeting this week that included chief of staff Mark Meadows and some 20 other White House officials, including Secret Service agents, nobody from the White House was wearing a mask or other face covering.
“It’s a personal choice. That's the whole point of the guidelines in the first place. If you want to wear one, you can wear one," said one White House official. "It's not a conscious effort to try and raise the alarm or not raise the alarm."
Another White House official emphasized that the CDC guidance is “voluntary” and that most staffers don’t cover their faces while at work. “I don't wear one when I'm here, but I take an Uber back and forth to work every day because the Metro and buses are so terrible right now. ... But when I’m here on complex, just sitting at my desk, in a meeting where there's plenty of distance, I don't wear one.”
There are a few exceptions in the West Wing. As POLITICO previously reported, Matthew Pottinger, the deputy national security adviser, has sometimes worn a mask. Maybe he knows something: his wife is a former CDC microbiologist.
The cleaning crews at the White House are another exception. “A ton of cleaners are always wearing a mask and there seems to be a lot more of them around,” said a third White House official, "especially in the West Wing.”
Face coverings are not usually for personal protection. Unless the mask has a filter, like an N95 mask, the CDC says it won’t offer protection from possibly inhaling the coronavirus. But in situations where social distancing is harder to do, like a workplace or grocery store, a mask reduces the ability of an asymptomatic infected person to spread the virus.
Pence argued that because he’s regularly tested, he wasn’t putting anyone at risk by not wearing a mask at the Mayo Clinic. The counterargument is that the clinic requires all visitors to wear a mask and that Pence’s nonchalance about the policy undercuts the public health campaign to encourage covering up.
But others took Pence’s maskless photo-op as a political statement. Perhaps it was a show of power and authority: I don’t have to wear a mask because I have access to regular testing. In that sense being in close proximity to people without covering your face is a kind of new status symbol for the pandemic era. Or perhaps it was a kind of dog whistle to the pro-Trump base that has been skeptical about the pandemic response.
The virtue signaling seems to have spilled over to Capitol Hill. During a vote on the latest coronavirus relief package last week, POLITICO reported that about a dozen Republicans declined to wear masks on the House floor. One of the maskless lawmakers, Chip Roy, a Republican from Texas, said he wasn’t making an ideological statement and that members were “spaced out” on the floor, precluding the need for covering his face.
When asked if it was a cultural or ideological statement, another maskless Republican, Ralph Abraham, a veterinarian turned family doctor from Louisiana, gave an emphatic “Nooo, nooo!”
Not all of the maskless behavior on the right seems ideological. Some members just seem to be struggling to adapt to new rules like everyone else. A POLITICO reporter spotted one masked Democratic member who actually removed his mask when he encountered a colleague, and they posed for a picture together.
But there is clearly a growing partisan split. Democratic leaders in the House have made more of a point about wearing masks on camera than Republican leaders. Democrat Jim Clyburn donned one at a press conference on Thursday with Nancy Pelosi, who generally uses a scarf. None of the top three House GOP leaders wore masks at an outdoor press conference at the Capitol last week.
The mask divide is spilling into policymaking. Congressional Democrats, backed by flight attendant unions, have been leading a campaign to force the use of masks on airplanes, which the Trump administration has resisted. (In the absence of a mandate, Delta, American, United, JetBlue, and Frontier have all recently adopted a mask policy for passengers.)
Some people seems as worked up about face coverings as others are about tax policy or abortion. In response to a recent POLITICO report about the Pence imbroglio, one person on Twitter wrote, “Get over it, I don’t wear a mask either and I NEVER WILL!”
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