Jared Kushner has framed the White House response to coronavirus as a “great success story.” The president’s son-in-law and senior adviser clearly sees himself as instrumental to that supposed triumph, as he leads the COVID “impact team,” a sort of shadow task force commissioned by Donald Trump to “break down every barrier needed to make sure that teams can succeed.” “We’re on the other side of the medical aspect of this and I think that we’ve achieved all of the different milestones that are needed,” Kushner said last month. “The federal government rose to the challenge.”
But behind the scenes of that so-called “extraordinary” work by the Trump administration, things have seemed far less rosy. According to news reports and a recent whistleblower complaint, Kushner’s crack squad of young private sector volunteers—hailing from venture capital, private equity and consulting firms—has been beset by crippling incompetence and political cronyism, exacerbating the federal government’s gross mismanagement of the coronavirus crisis that has killed more than 70,000 in the United States. “Americans are facing a crisis of tragic proportions and there is an urgent need for an effective, efficient and bold response,” a member of Kushner’s team said in a whistleblower report sent to the House Oversight Committee on April 8, and which was obtained by the Washington Post. “From my few weeks as a volunteer, I believe we are falling short.”
According to the whistleblower, volunteers on Kushner’s team often lacked relevant qualifications to help get necessary resources to hospitals fighting the COVID crisis, with team members who didn’t have sufficient “health care, procurement, or supply-chain operations” experience assigned to help obtain and direct supplies to medical workers. Moreover, the Kushner team fast-tracked protective equipment leads from a list of “V.I.P.s,” including Trump allies in the conservative media like Fox News hosts Brian Kilmeade and Jeanine Pirro. “The nature and scale of the response seemed grossly inadequate,” the whistleblower told the New York Times, which obtained documents, including the “V.I.P. Update” spreadsheet, and interviewed other officials that corroborated the former volunteer’s complaint to the House Oversight Committee.
“Grossly inadequate” is a pretty accurate description of Kushner’s entire career in government, which has been marked by embarrassing overconfidence, few tangible accomplishments, and the general sense that he’s more or less getting in the way. That’s certainly been true of his coronavirus response. Despite no real qualifications beyond being married to the president’s daughter, who is also unqualified and is also involved in the administration’s handling of the pandemic, Kushner has operated his own COVID task force, which has largely served to add an extra layer of confusion to the White House’s already shambolic response. That it is an absolute mess of ineptitude and political favoritism could hardly be less surprising. What’s ironic, perhaps, is that the specific way in which it is failing is precisely what it was designed to get around. Kushner has often styled himself as a disruptor of sorts, defending his so-called “Slim Suit Crowd” to the Times last month as empowered to work “faster” than typical Washington bureaucracy. But according to the whistleblower, volunteers on Kushner’s coronavirus team have been working through “bureaucratic cycles of chaos.”
Kushner’s bungling is just one fractal in the Trump administration’s overall coronavirus mishandling. As sidelined vaccine expert Dr. Rick Bright outlined in his own whistleblower complaint Tuesday, the administration has put political connections ahead of public health and pushed unproven drugs as potential cures for the virus—and pushed him out when he rang alarms about it. That has had, and will likely continue to have, dire consequences for those on the front lines of the fight against the pandemic, who continue to lack sufficient supplies, and Americans in general, more of whom are becoming infected every day—particularly as Trump declares premature victory over the virus and pushes for states and businesses to reopen. As the volunteer on Kushner’s team wrote in the April complaint, “These problems affect the entire chain of command, hamper our ability to respond and could result in many Americans losing their lives.”
More Great Stories From Vanity Fair
— In Blistering Whistleblower Complaint, Rick Bright Blasts Team Trump’s Pandemic Response
— Trump’s Plan to Reopen America Involves 3,000 People Dying a Day by June 1
— Inside Donald Trump and Jared Kushner’s Two Months of Magical Thinking
— How Andrew Cuomo Became the Coronavirus Trump Antidote
— What Do Your Genetics Have to Do With Your Chances of Dying From Coronavirus?
— How to Work From Home, According to Neuroscience
— From the Archive: The Untold Story of Dallas’s Heroic Ebola Response
Looking for more? Sign up for our daily Hive newsletter and never miss a story.