Response hamstrung by impasse
WASHINGTON: A littleknown agency that keeps the US federal bureaucracy running is the biggest impediment to new efforts to fight the coronavirus outbreak, Democratic presidentelect Joe Biden said yesterday.
‘‘There’s a whole lot of things that we just don’t have available to us,’’ Biden said, including realtime data on personal protective equipment and the distribution plan for Covid19 vaccines.
Emily Murphy, administrator of the General Services Administration, must ‘‘ascertain’’ the winner of the November 3 presidential election between Biden and Republican President Donald Trump. That is a condition of releasing funds and resources to the winner, but she has so far not done so.
Despite a clear margin of victory for Biden, Trump has refused to concede, and his legal challenges are fizzling.
Murphy has sole authority to release salaries, office space, official email addresses and intelligence briefings to an incoming administration, which formally takes over with Biden’s inauguration on January 20.
‘‘Unless it’s made available soon, we’re going to be behind by weeks or months,’’ in his administration’s coronavirus effort, Biden told emergency responders, nurses and other frontline workers at an online event in Washington. A third wave of coronavirus infection has gripped the US, and the country’s death toll passed 250,000 yesterday.
New York City’s public school system, the nation’s largest, called a halt to inclassroom instruction yesterday, citing a jump in infection rates, as the grim milestone was reached.
It was just one of many recent restrictions on social and economic life reimposed by state and local officials nationwide to tamp down a surge in Covid19 cases and hospital admissions heading into winter.
Nearly 79,000 Covid19 patients were reported in US hospitals as of yesterday, the highest number yet for a single day.
Health experts say greater social mixing and indoor gatherings during the holiday season, combined with colder weather, could accelerate the surge, threatening to overwhelm the strained healthcare system.
Despite this danger, New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy, a Democrat, yesterday described a ‘‘crazy situation’’ in which he speaks daily with the White House coronavirus experts, and then has a separate channel of communications with Biden’s advisory board on the virus. ‘‘Those two camps aren’t speaking. And that’s a big problem,’’ Murphy told CNN. The GSA’s Murphy is under mounting pressure to recognise Biden as the winner.
‘‘She’s going to make an ascertainment when the winner is clear, as laid out in the Constitution,’’ a GSA spokeswoman said before Biden’s remarks.
The bipartisan National Task Force on Election Crises said on Wednesday it was ‘‘past time’’ for the GSA administrator to certify Biden.
‘‘This isn’t about politics. It’s about honouring free and fair elections. It’s also about lost lives,’’ the group said.
Trump claims, without providing evidence, that he was cheated out of a victory by widespread fraud and has fired off a flurry of lawsuits that judges have mostly rejected.
Murphy is relying on precedent, her office said, citing the fiveweek delay after the 2000 election before Republican George W. Bush was declared the winner.
While the 2000 result hung on 537 votes in just one state — Florida — Trump would need to reverse Biden’s large margins in three of four closely contested states, something election experts and a growing number of Republicans say is virtually impossible.
Trump Administration sources said it was reasonable to wait until vote recounts were completed and the legal challenges had been resolved.
Trump’s election campaign yesterday asked a judge to declare him the winner in Pennsylvania, saying the state’s Republicancontrolled legislature should select the electors who will cast votes in the US Electoral College system. Biden won Pennsylvania by about 82,000 votes, according to Edison Research.