Kushner’s volunteer force fumbled hunt for supplies
This spring, as the United States faced a critical shortage of masks, gloves and other protective equipment to battle the coronavirus pandemic, a South Carolina physician reached out to the Federal Emergency Management Agency with an offer of help.
Dr. Jeffrey Hendricks had longtime manufacturing contacts in China and a line on millions of masks from established suppliers. Instead of encountering seasoned FEMA procurement officials, his information was diverted to a team of roughly a dozen young volunteers, recruited by the president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and overseen by a former assistant to Kushner’s wife, Ivanka Trump.
The volunteers, foot soldiers in the Trump administration’s new supplychain task force, had little to no experience with government procurement procedures or medical equipment. But as part of Kushner’s governmentwide push to secure protective gear for the nation’s doctors and nurses, the volunteers were put in charge of sifting through more than a thousand incoming leads, and told to pass only the best ones on for further review by FEMA officials.
As the federal government’s warehouses were running bare and medical workers improvised their own safety gear, Hendricks found his offer stalled. Many of the volunteers were told to prioritize tips from political allies and associates of President Donald Trump, tracked on a spreadsheet called “VIP Update,” according to documents and emails obtained by The New York Times.
Few of the leads, VIP or otherwise, panned out, according to a whistleblower memo written by one volunteer and sent to the House Oversight Committee. The group was confused and overwhelmed by their task, the whistleblower said in interviews.
“The nature and scale of the response seemed grossly inadequate,” said the volunteer, who spoke only on the condition of anonymity and, like the others, signed a nondisclosure agreement. “It was bureaucratic cycles of chaos.”