Jared Kushner at a White House briefing on the response to the COVID-19 crisis on 2 April, 2020 (AFP photo)

Volunteers who helped supervise the Trump administration’s supply-chain task force for the coronavirus were told to prioritize tips from political allies and associates of President Donald Trump, a new report shows.

The task force led by Trump’s son-in-law and senior White House adviser Jared Kushner and overseen by a former aide to Ivanka Trump is comprised of volunteers with little to no experience with government procurement procedures or medical equipment, The New York Times reported.

Citing documents and emails, The Times said the volunteers were instructed to prioritize protective equipment leads from people who were tracked on a spreadsheet called V.I.P. Update.

Republican members of Congress, conservative activist Charlie Kirk and Tana Goertz, a former Apprentice contestant and Trump surrogate were among those included on the list, according to the report.

Conservative journalists friendly to the White House like Fox & Friends host Brian Kilmeade and Fox News Channel host Jeanine Pirro were also on the list.

Pirro repeatedly lobbied the Trump administration for a specific New York hospital to get a large number of masks, according to one source.

Meanwhile, most of the leads, both garnered from the VIP list and other sources, were fruitless, according to a whistleblower memo written by one volunteer and obtained by The Times.

The nature and scale of the response seemed grossly inadequate, the volunteer told The Times on condition of anonymity. It was bureaucratic cycles of chaos.

While some government officials have expressed alarm at the presence of the inexperienced volunteers, Kushner praised them in a statement, saying These volunteers are true patriots.

Many of them were poorly matched with their assigned tasks, including those whose job was to secure personal protective equipment (PPE) for hospitals nationwide, according to a complaint lodged last month with the House Oversight Committee.

Six administration officials, many of whom spoke on condition of anonymity, confirmed key elements of the complaint, obtained by The Washington Post and filed by a volunteer who has since left the group.

Americans are facing a crisis of tragic proportions and there is an urgent need for an effective, efficient and bold response, reads the complaint, which was sent to the committee on April 8. From my few weeks as a volunteer, I believe we are falling short. I am writing to alert my representatives of these challenges and to ask that they do everything possible to help front-line health-care workers and other Americans in need.

The task force exacerbated chronic problems in obtaining supplies for hospitals and other needs at the time when the United States faced a critical shortage of masks, gloves and other protective equipment to battle the coronavirus pandemic.

Health experts say procuring PPE requires expertise in the different types of equipment hospitals need.

That’s the danger - there may be decisions being made that are not fully informed and that’s going to lead to downstream effects on the response, said Amesh Adalja, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security and an infectious-disease physician.

Jordan Libowitz, a spokesman for Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, said that the volunteers should be categorized as special government employees and that the arrangement raises many concerns.

This is the problem with operating off the books, he said. We just don’t know if they’re following the law or not.

The Trump administration has been repeatedly criticized for mishandling the crisis. The president on Sunday said the coronavirus death toll in the country could reach 100,000, a projection that seems to be a considerable upward shift from his previous estimates.

Less than two weeks ago, Trump said at a White House press briefing that between 50,000 to 60,000 people would die of the virus.

So far, the virus has infected more than 1,237,600 and killed over 72,200 across the United States, according to worldometers.info.

SOURCE: PRESS TV