Board delays vaccine pacts
Members cite lack of transparency in emergency contracts
The Maryland Board of Public Works on Wednesday delayed approving three emergency contracts the state health department awarded to bolster its response to the COVID-19 pandemic, with two of three board members citing a lack of transparency.
Comptroller Peter Franchot and Treasurer Nancy Kopp, both Democrats, voted to push back a decision on approving the approximately $3.8 million contract awarded to consulting firm Ernst & Young to help with the vaccine rollout. The state has already paid Ernst & Young, as well as the two other companies whose after-the-fact contract approvals were delayed Wednesday.
State health officials have said Ernst & Young, based in New York, is helping with supply chain management, forensic accounting and staffing for vaccine allocation, a description Franchot dismissed Wednesday as “broad, carefully crafted consultant verbiage.” He said the lack of information about this deal underscored the need for more transparency and accountability for the state’s emergency spending.
Lt. Gov. Boyd Rutherford, the third member of the panel, voted to approve the three contracts. He defended the state’s emergency procurement powers, likening the securing of outside services during a pandemic to a natural disaster that washes away a bridge — whether it’s urgent infrastructure repairs or a pressing public health emergency, there’s not time for the state to undertake the lengthy procurement process. He said there is already ample oversight.
“There is a balance that is struck between transparency that is in place and making sure that we get the projects done when they are done,” said Rutherford, a Republican.
“Given the speed, scale and the sheer breadth of the supply chain management and the planning and logistics needs for vaccine distribution, it has made it abundantly clear we needed outside help,” he said.
Emergency contracts have drawn scrutiny from state officials.
the U.S.-Mexico border threatens to overshadow the administration’s ambitious legislative agenda.
But the high-profile assignment for Harris, who ran for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020 and is expected to run for the White House again in the future, could be politically fraught.
To that end, Biden teased in his comments that he was saddling her with a “tough job.”
“Needless to say, the work will not be easy,” Harris said about her new assignment. “But it is important work.”
Harris is tasked with overseeing diplomatic efforts to deal with issues spurring migration in the Northern Triangle countries of El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras, as well as pressing them to strengthen enforcement on their own borders, administration officials said. More broadly, though, she’s tasked with implementing a long-term strategy that gets at the root causes of migration from those countries.
She will work closely with Secretary of State Antony Blinken, the yet-to-be confirmed U.S. Agency for International Development administrator Samantha Powers, and Ricardo Zuniga, special envoy to the Northern Triangle countries.
Biden made the announcement as a delegation of White House officials and members of Congress was traveling to the southern border Wednesday to tour a facility in Carrizo Springs, Texas, being used to house migrant children.
More than 750 teenagers are being held at Carrizo Springs. Like other facilities operated by the Health and Human Services
Department, it includes a small group of children who have tested positive for COVID-19, potentially having contracted the virus in Border Patrol custody. They are placed in isolation.
The Biden administration has in recent weeks moved to open more than 10,000 new beds across the Southwest in convention centers and former oilfield camps. It notified Congress on Wednesday that it will open a new 3,000-person facility in San Antonio and a 1,400-person site at the San Diego convention center. HHS is also opening a second site in Carrizo Springs and exploring housing teenagers at military bases in San Antonio and El Paso, Texas.
But the U.S. is exhausting capacity almost as quickly as it can add it. A week after opening, the convention center in downtown Dallas is at nearly 2,000 teenagers, just shy of its 2,300-bed capacity. Experts on child welfare say HHS must release children more quickly, particularly the estimated 40% of children in custody who have a parent in the U.S. ready to take them.
The White House was limiting media access on Wednesday’s tour, keeping it to just one TV crew. White House press secretary Jen Psaki said Wednesday that the White House was “committed to transparency and we’ll continue to work with agencies on creating avenues for media access to and visibility into these facilities.”
Still, questions have grown about a lack of transparency at the border as the administration has stymied most efforts by outsiders to see and document the conditions. A Democratic lawmaker released photos earlier this week to show conditions at the facility and to display the extreme challenges that border agents face in watching so many children, sometimes for a week or longer despite the Border Patrol’s three-day limit on detaining minors.
Republican Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, who is leading a separate delegation of GOP senators to the border later this week, decried what he said was a “crisis” at the border and the lack of press access as a “muzzling” of the media by the Democratic administration.
“Joe Biden doesn’t want you to see,” Cruz told reporters at the Capitol.
Located at a converted “man camp” for oilfield workers, the Carrizo Springs site first opened to migrant teenagers briefly in 2019 during the last sharp rise in border crossings. The Biden administration reopened it in February. It has long, narrow dormitories and classrooms set up in trailers, with a large tent that serves as a dining hall.
Officials are trying to build up capacity to care for some 14,000 migrants now in federal custody — and more likely on the way.
Since Biden’s inauguration on Jan. 20, the U.S. has seen a dramatic spike in the number of people encountered by border officials. There were 18,945 family members and 9,297 unaccompanied children encountered in February — an increase of 168% and 63%, respectively, from the month before, according to the Pew Research Center. That creates an enormous logistical challenge because children, in particular, require higher standards of care and coordination across agencies.
Among the reasons for the increase: thousands of Central American migrants already stuck at the border for months and the persistent scourge of gang violence afflicting Northern Triangle countries.
Still, the encounters of both unaccompanied minors and families are lower than they were at various points during the Trump administration, including in spring 2019.