Everything this administration does is for the benefit of big business owners & stockholders: Coronavirus edition

It usually takes up to three months [for DuPont] to ship [Tyvek] material to Vietnam, where it is sewn into body suits, and get it back. When the federal government offered to pay for chartered flights to reduce the round trip for 750,000 items to 10 days, DuPont agreed.

  NBC News

Please note: the government payment to DuPont is your tax dollars, not "the government's" money.

Then DuPont sold the suits to a third-party distributor for approximately $4 each, according to company documents it provided to NBC News, and that distributor sold them to the government. The company initially declined to say how much the Department of Health and Human Services paid for 750,000 suits, and it refused to identify the third-party distributor or say how much that firm charged the federal government.

It was defintely more than $4. This is how they take your tax dollar and put them in the pockets of corporations - middle men. The suits could have been bought directly from DuPont for approximately $4 each.  And why can't we know how much they atually ended up costing us?

President Donald Trump and HHS, which announced the deal last week, described the arrangement as one in a string of massive successes in delivering badly needed medical equipment into the U.S. in an expedited fashion.

But for some government officials familiar with the supply-chain end of the coronavirus fight, it was yet another example of Trump's task force serving industry as the White House tried to corner the market on medical supplies.

For weeks, Trump has resisted pressure to use the full power of his office to temporarily turn the private sector into an arm of the federal government in a national emergency. He and his lieutenants instead have used the crisis to make federal assets and personnel a support group for industry, rather than the other way around, according to NBC News' interviews with dozens of public- and private-sector sources involved in various aspects of the coronavirus response.

[...]

[T]he vice president's coronavirus task force — mostly through a supply-chain unit led by Rear Adm. John Polowczyk, vice director of logistics for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and heavily influenced by White House adviser Jared Kushner, the president's son-in-law — has favored some of the nation's largest corporations and ignored smaller producers of goods and services with long track records of meeting emergency needs.

[...]

They have operated almost entirely in the dark, releasing few details of their arrangements with the big companies; created a new and convoluted emergency response system; and sown confusion and distrust in the states and among the people who need medical supplies.

There is virtually no accountability for their decisions about how and where to allocate emergency equipment.

[...]

Just as DuPont wouldn't say how much the Tyvek suits cost U.S. taxpayers, a spokesperson for FedEx laughed when asked what the government is paying for each of the 40 flights the carrier has chartered for the HHS and the Federal Emergency Management Agency. But a senior government official involved in the response effort said such charter flights can cost as much as $1 million apiece, while federal agencies can borrow comparable Defense Department planes for about $10,000 an hour. A round trip from the East Coast to Vietnam on a commercial flight takes about 41 hours of flying time.

[...]

The two priorities that officials say haven't been sacrificed by Trump or his supply chain task force, dubbed "the children" inside FEMA's headquarters, are private profit and the ability of the White House to choose where supplies go.

[...]

The supply chain task force leaders pushed aside federal emergency management response teams that had long-established methods for engaging assistance from the public and private sectors. Instead, they first reached out to personal contacts.

[...]

"Jared and his friends decided they were going to do their thing," said the senior government official involved in the response effort. "It cost weeks."

[...]

One potential supplier, whose officials spoke to NBC News on the condition of anonymity to avoid hurting future contract opportunities, was originally contacted by a FEMA regional official in mid-March about producing face shields, which protect medical personnel from being sprayed with virus particles by patients.

The supplier initially bought $20,000 of material and told the regional office that production could be ramped up to 10,000 face shields per day, using a supply chain based fully in the U.S., almost immediately. But word came back that under the new system, the regional office couldn't approve the buy. The application would have to go through the main federal acquisition system, where it still sits.

[...]

For companies working with the administration, [they are required] to give control of the allocation of 60 percent of their goods to the federal government. Their normal customers, even those in need, are being denied the supplies they expected.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.