No good deed goes unpunished. Dr Deborah Birx has been Trump’s personal coddler throughout this pandemic crisis, always putting a smiley face on his inane gibberish.
But as has happened to virtually all of Trump’s closest associates, she’s been stabbed in the back and marginalized in favor of a full-blown snake oil Trumpian crank:
Once a fixture at the administration’s coronavirus briefings, Dr. Deborah Birx has confided to aides and friends that she has become so unhappy with what she sees as her diminished role as coordinator of the White House coronavirus task force that she is not certain how much longer she can serve in her position, sources familiar with her thinking tell CNN.
Birx has told people around her that she is “distressed” with the direction of the task force, describing the situation inside the nation’s response to the coronavirus as nightmarish.According to people familiar with her thinking, Birx views Dr. Scott Atlas, a recent addition to the task force, as an unhealthy influence on President Donald Trump’s thinking when it comes to the virus.
“The President has found somebody who matches what he wants to believe,” a source close to Birx said of her view of Atlas’s relationship with Trump. “There is no doubt that she feels that her role has been diminished.
“Birx believes Atlas is feeding the President misleading information about the efficacy of face masks for controlling the spread of the virus, the source said. Trump, whose rallies draw crowds of supporters who refuse to wear masks, has repeatedly mocked Democratic rival Joe Biden for using them.
Atlas, a neuroradiologist without expertise in infectious diseases, has seen his prominent role on the task force come under some scrutiny as respected medical experts have questioned his controversial flirtation with “herd immunity” as a solution for the outbreak in the US…
“When you isolate everyone, including all the healthy people, you’re prolonging the problem because you’re preventing population immunity. Low-risk groups getting the infection is not a problem,” Atlas told Fox News in July.
An administration official close to the West Wing’s coronavirus response acknowledged the addition of Atlas has unsettled some of the experts on the task force. But the official maintained Atlas “shook things up a bit” and brought “fresh eyes” to discussions behind the scenes, a dynamic Trump prefers.
The same source said Birx, who has spent much of her career tackling global health crises from Covid-19 to AIDS, is not likely to end her time in government service by stepping down from the task force. “She is a good soldier. I don’t think she’s going anywhere,” the source said.
Yeah, I don’t think so either. But it would be smart for her to check out now but she won’t. She’s a true believer.
What a moving tribute to the late Justice. It’s nice to see all those smart people out there carrying on the Ginsburg tradition. It’s going to be a very tough fight.
Watching Republican senators publicly and unapologetically contradict a stream of forceful declarations in 2016 about how under no circumstances should the Senate hold United States Supreme Court hearings during an election year, ought to finally convince the Beltway press that the GOP can no longer be trusted on any topic. A party that has detached itself from reality and now occupies a Trump-inspired alternative universe where facts don’t matter, Republicans no longer deserve the media’s professional respect.
Lied to relentlessly about all topics, reporters and producers should grasp that one of our two major political parties in this country will no longer engage in rational debate. Yet the press refuses to make that crucial acknowledgement.
Still clinging to the idea that the GOP is filled with honorable men, the press won’t tell the truth about today’s radical Republican Party. The denial is driven by the fact the press won’t concede that the two parties are no longer mirror reflections of each other, occupying opposite sides of the political spectrum. Firmly committed to an outdated Both Sides approach to the news, the press realizes that if the GOP is identified as a radical outlier, news outlets then have to find an entirely different way to cover the news. They also understand that accurately labeling the GOP as an extremist vehicle will make them the targets of “liberal media bias” attacks.
Instead of being honest, the press has wasted four years pretending behind closed doors that leaders of the Republican Party are aghast at Trump’s un-democratic and corrupt behavior. Assuring readers and viewers that Republicans “privately” remain deeply concerned, the press has done its best to normalize the party in the face of Trump’s extremist tendencies.
The press thinks the GOP should be unnerved by Trump’s obvious racism and authoritarian ways, therefore the press presents that assumption as fact, often with coverage that doesn’t include a single important Republican player who’s actually upset by Trump’s racist or authoritarian behavior. The media’s Moby Dick-like pursuit of outraged Republicans always comes up empty.
By ascribing claims to Republicans that don’t exist — they’re “unnerved” by Trump — the press normalizes today’s GOP, which has remained silent in recent weeks regarding stunning revelations about Russian intelligence offering up bounties on the killing of U.S. soldiers, Trump’s admission that he lied to the American people about a cataclysmic public health crisis, and his blatant campaign to raise doubts about free and fair elections in America.
As for the Ginsburg fallout, “hypocrisy” doesn’t begin to describe what’s happening in terms of Republicans reversing course on election-year nominations. Instead, we’re seeing an entire party announcing there are no rules of conduct. They have embraced the nihilist idea that nothing they say should carry any weight because they can, and will, change their minds without reason or justification, which gives politicians an extraordinary leeway. All this, while Democrats adhere to traditional guidelines of behavior, and get penalized by the press in the process. They’re penalized because by playing dumb about the GOP, the press pretends the same rules apply for both parties. They don’t, and Republicans know that — they know they have effectively rigged the system. And the Ruth Bader Ginsburg coverage proves that.
Refusing to tell the truth about the GOP has been a decade-long failure of the Beltway media, and served as a hallmark breakdown during President Barack Obama’s two terms in office. For years, the press danced around Republicans’ incessant obstructionism. Eager to maintain a political symmetry in which both sides are responsible for sparking conflict (i.e. center-right Republicans vs. center-left Democrats), the press gave one side a pass. Over and over, the media narrative was that Republicans were being savvy in thwarting Obama, who simply couldn’t figure out the ways of Capitol Hill.
The 2014 obstruction of the Clay Hunt Suicide Prevention for American Veterans Act was especially galling, as a single Republican senator blocked a vote on the crucial veterans bill. At the time of the bill’s blockade, Media Matters noted that there was virtually no coverage of the radical barrier on CNN, Fox News, ABC, CBS, NBC or PBS, as well as news blackouts in the nation’s six largest newspapers: The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, USA Today, Los Angeles Times, New York Post, The Washington Post, Chicago Sun-Times, The Denver Post, and Chicago Tribune.
There’s no question it’s easier for news outlets to continue pretending that Trump’s Republican Party adheres to traditional guidelines of public discourse. But that’s a fantasy the media should stop peddling.
This tracks with my Salon piece this morning about how the Republicans have exactly the president they always wanted.
And, by the way, this piece by Barton Gellman about how they plan to steal the election has revelations in it that deserve full-page one treatment at least as big as this:
The New York Times reports that the Russian government is having a much easier time spreading their disinformation about the election because they can just use Trump’s own lies:
In interviews, a range of officials and private analysts said that Mr. Trump was feeding many of the disinformation campaigns they were struggling to halt. And rather than travel the back roads of America searching for divisive issues — as three Russians from the Internet Research Agency did in 2016 — they are staying home, grabbing screenshots of Mr. Trump’s Twitter posts, or quoting his misleading statements and then amplifying those messages.
That campaign is at the heart of the disinformation efforts that the F.B.I. director, Christopher A. Wray, warned Congress last week was meant “to both sow divisiveness and discord” and “to denigrate” former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., the Democratic nominee. Mr. Trump chastised him for his comments on Twitter.
“But Chris, you don’t see any activity from China, even though it is a FAR greater threat than Russia, Russia, Russia,” he said. He went on to repeat the kind of statements the Russians have been exploiting, writing that the two countries would take advantage of “our totally vulnerable Unsolicited (Counterfeit?) Ballot Scam.”
Twitter flagged the president’s tweet, urging readers to click on a link to “learn how voting by mail is safe and secure.”
The F.B.I. and the Department of Homeland Security on Tuesday again warned of the risk of interference in the election, this time by foreigners aiming to exploit the time it will take to sort through mail-in ballots. During that time, the agencies said, hackers could amplify “disinformation that includes reports of voter suppression, cyberattacks targeting election infrastructure, voter or ballot fraud and other problems intended to convince the public of the elections’ illegitimacy.”
The warning made no mention that the president had recently listed several of those techniques as likely to plague the vote.
Multiple U.S. officials with access to the intelligence have said Mr. Trump has been doing the job of the Russian propagandists for them. Mr. Biden’s national security adviser when he was vice president, Antony J. Blinken, charged at a U.S. Chamber of Commerce forum on Tuesday that as a “leading consumer and purveyor of conspiracy theories,” Mr. Trump “seems to have suited up for the other side.”
Clint Watts, a former F.B.I. special agent and a fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, said his review of the disinformation traffic showed that “the Russians in 2016 had to make false news stories or manipulated truths to power their narratives.”
“This time they’re not writing anything that’s not already said in U.S. space,” often by Mr. Trump himself, Mr. Watts added. “They must be flabbergasted and saying, ‘We really don’t need to work hard this time.’”
Much of the Russian traffic echoes Mr. Trump’s effort to establish an argument for rejecting the election results if he loses in states that are mailing ballots to all voters for the first time. But of the states doing so for the first time this election, only Nevada is seriously in contention.
No sooner did Mr. Trump begin to contend that the system was ridden with fraud than Russian trolls, bots and news sites joined in. In late May, the state-backed Russian website RT was quick to publish an article claiming that such ballots “are the easiest route to a RIGGED ELECTION.”
By early August, the Strategic Culture Foundation — an online journal that the State Department declared recently “is directed by Russian Foreign Intelligence Service” — had picked up on the same theme, according to analysts at Recorded Future, a group based in Somerville, Mass., that analyzes cyberactivity by foreign governments.
Those Russian government workers deserve a break. It’s nice of Trump to do their work for them.
President Trump repeatedly says that he’s accomplished more than any president in history. I’ve never heard anyone ask him to lay out specifically what he means by that. He can try to take credit for signing big tax cuts for the wealthy, but that was passed by the Republican Congress with little input from him. It’s true that his executive branch agencies have overturned many environmental rules and other regulations, but he hasn’t been involved and clearly doesn’t know the details.
Trump’s corruption has given his consigliere, Attorney General Bill Barr, the opportunity to further his own “powerful executive” theory. His craven pandering to white supremacists and the evangelical right has kept the base bonded tightly to the Republican Party. But beyond that his list of accomplishments is nil. He has literally done nothing but run his mouth and turn the U.S. into an object of fear and pity around the world
But as much as Republicans no doubt cringe at his ignorant antics, they have exactly what they always wanted. For all his embarrassing narcissism and ineptitude, Trump is the personification of what Republican operative Grover Norquist once told a group of activists a few years back was the perfect president:
We are not auditioning for “fearless leader.” We don’t need a president to tell us where to go. We know what direction we want to go. … We don’t need someone to think it up or design it. Pick a Republican with enough working digits to handle a pen to become president of the United States.
Trump doesn’t know what his great accomplishments are, nor can he explain what he plans to do in his second term other than “more of the same,” whatever that is. That, in large measure, is exactly why he has the continued loyalty of the officials in his party.
The mere fact that Trump has the working digits to hold a pen has allowed Mitch McConnell and the far-right Federalist Society to pack the courts with extremist judges, many unqualified and all of them young. They’ve allowed Trump to think he did something special. But that happened because McConnell blocked dozens of Obama’s nominees, including, of course, Merrick Garland, whom Obama named to the Supreme Court and who didn’t even get a hearing. Then McConnell coerced Justice Anthony Kennedy to retire, and got tragically lucky last week with the untimely death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
Trump had absolutely nothing to do with any of that beyond warming the desk chair in the Oval Office and signing the pieces of paper they handed him. His bragging about his “legacy” on the courts is a joke. If it’s anyone’s legacy, it’s McConnell’s.
As Salon’s Andrew O’Hehir has argued, McConnell is more or less in a win-win situation whether the vote on the next Supreme Court nominee is held before or after the presidential election. He either gets his own legacy sealed with a 6-3 extremist majority for a generation or, if he is forced to wait, his endangered Senate Republicans have something to juice right-wing turnout, potentially saving McConnell’s Senate majority. Whether they win or lose in November, they have till January to complete the confirmation and will probably get the seat anyway.
As of Tuesday, it appears that McConnell has the votes to confirm whichever young, far-right woman he and the Federalist Society have chosen for Trump to nominate. Unless the Democrats decide to pull out all the stops to stall the confirmation — which is implausible, based on everything we know about their behavior — Trump’s choice may very well be seated just before Election Day.
I had initially assumed that Trump was being foolish to rush the confirmation. After all, if this seat is such a motivator for the base, why wouldn’t you use it to ensure they come out to vote by saying that if Trump doesn’t win, they may not be able to confirm his choice? Sure, they’ll still have the votes in the lame-duck session but you’d think Trump would be able to convince Republican voters that the court is lost to the liberals unless they show up to vote for him. Fear-mongering is his specialty.
I had also assumed that Trump was making a silly calculation that getting a third Supreme Court seat filled during his first term would make him look like a “winner,” which, in his mind, is a huge motivation for voting for him. And there would be the added, all-important benefit of owning the libs.
He’s not the only one who sees this as a motivator. Take this headline from the conservative Townhall.com in which Matt Vespa dispenses with all the Republicans’ hypocritical and unconvincing retreats from their previous positions on filling a seat in an election year and tells it like it is: “Shove It, Democrats. Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s Seat Is Ours … And There’s Nothing You Can Do About It”:
Welcome to Thunderdome, b**ches. This is the fight that distinguishes the men from the boys; who can deliver a strike to the jugular and who can’t; and between who’s weak and who wants to win.
Or as Trump more prosaically put it during a Fox News interview on Monday, “When you have the votes, you can sort of do what you want.”
Republicans aren’t trying to hide their will to power. But there is a hitch. We still sort of, kind of have a democratic system — and if the polls are correct, a large majority of voters is getting ready to reject them. So it looks as if this Supreme Court seat, and all the seats Mitch McConnell has filled in the lower courts, may have to step up and be the partisan players they were chosen to be.
On Saturday night in Fayetteville, North Carolina, Trump said the quiet part out loud, as usual:
Now we’re counting on the federal court system to make it so that we can actually have an evening where we know who wins — not where the votes are going to be counted a week later, two weeks later.
On Monday he made it very clear why he is rushing the nomination through:
Vice President Mike Pence made the same point, emphasizing the need for nine justices to decide election cases about “mail-in ballots.” (Apparently, they’ve decided they can’t count on Chief Justice John Roberts to do their bidding.)
Mike Pence urges the Senate to confirm SCOTUS nominee quickly, with "a hearing if needs be," because there may be litigation following the election pic.twitter.com/FHjqfxu8iC
Republicans have hundreds of lawyers spread out across the country prepared to file lawsuits and Bill Barr stands ready to bring the full force of the federal government to bear, despite the fact that it is not a party to state elections.
So I thought Trump was being shortsighted in his desire to “win” this battle before the election — but maybe I was wrong. Frankly, I’m pretty sure that if the Republicans thought he could win the election outright they would have persuaded him to use the open Supreme Court seat to help him get out the vote. But they all know that he’s extremely unpopular and highly unlikely to win a free and legitimate contest. So they’ve decided to try to re-run the disastrous 2000 election and have their partisan majority on the Supreme Court install Trump for another term instead. It worked marvelously the first time around — and it’s probably their best shot.
Proud Boys strut their stuff at a Patriot Prayer rally in Portland. (Photo by Dave Neiwert.)
Dave Neiwert detects a pattern you may have already. But he documents it at Daily Kos. Those “antifa buses” and “antifa arsonists” so-called patriots warned you about? Pure projection:
Because for the past three years, busloads of right-wing thugs eager for violence from rural and exurban areas have been organizing to descend on unsuspecting liberal urban centers—primarily Portland, Seattle, and San Francisco—in order to engage in faux “protests” primarily designed to spark violence.
A recent Washington Post feature about the man who organized a “Cruise for Trump” rally in Portland described in clear detail how this all works: A nonresident of a liberal urban center organizes a protest ostensibly around the right-wing cause du jour, which then attracts a horde of other nonresidents, whose supposed purpose is to come tell people who live in those cities how terrible their politics are—but whose underlying purpose, betrayed by the weapons and defensive gear they bring along with an attitude of eagerness to punch “leftists,” is to engage in violence.
The purpose is intimidation. They view the tactic as successful and you know what that means: more of it. Neiwert concludes:
Perhaps most ominously, the “Cruise for Trump” and other pro-Trump rallies in Oregon featuring Proud Boys and other far-right extremists have become more than mere attempts at intimidation—they are becoming massive conduits for the full absorption of extremist politics into the mainstream Republican Party. Indeed, whatever line existed between them appears to have vanished with a flourish of semiautomatic weapons and camo gear.
The stakes could not be higher in 2020, and the Trump-loving right—seeing the polls manifesting their leader’s massive failures, particular in mishandling the COVID-19 pandemic—is increasingly sounding desperate and angry. If this is a strategy that has worked in Oregon, we can probably count on it being applied in many other locales before the year is out.
So far, little of that here. Not expecting trouble on Election Day in the Cesspool of Sin, but we’re watchful. Anyway, Imperious Leader has told his vigilantes they need to go vote on Nov. 3.
Maybe, let’s show them how we do things downtown. Bring a friend to the polls. Better yet, ten.
Update: More from The Guardian backs up Neiwert’s reporting.
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Both the flood of “Breaking News” and the usual political distractions threaten to take our eyes off the ball six week ahead of the November election. Our determination to be right and to knock down the latest shiny lie or defend against the outrage du jour can be our undoing. Eyes on the prize.
Rather than react to the latest Republican voter suppression schemes or game out how Democrats might stop Mitch McConnell from approving another right-wing fanatic to the Supreme Court, Thomas Edsall examines five areas where things might go wrong for Democrats on Nov. 3. Let’s focus on the first and third:
First, there are indications that Trump’s base of support — whites without college degrees — is more energized and committed to voting this year than key Democratic constituencies. And there is also evidence that polling does not reflect this.
[…]
Third, absentee voting is expected to be higher among Democrats than Republicans, subjecting their ballots to a greater risk of rejection, a fate more common to mailed-in votes than to in-person voting.
A friend traveling on New England back roads sent a note yesterday saying, “Until yesterday, we had only seen 5 Biden yard signs. 100’s of Trump signs. Honest. Not until yesterday did we start seeing some more Biden signs in yards.” I reassured him that Democrats had sent candidates over $170 million on ActBlue since Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death (now over $200 million) while enthusiastic Trump supporters were sending their money to vendors hawking Trump campaign merch.
Signs don’t vote, nor do boats. Neither do Democrat-leaning “demographics.” But newly registered voters tend to. On that, Edsall heard from an unnamed Democratic strategist (key passage bolded):
In Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, he said, overall
registration is up by 6 points through August compared to the 2016 cycle, but net Democratic registrations are down by 38 percent. That’s about 150,000 fewer additional Democrats than were added in 2016.
In addition, he continued, registration among whites without college degrees
is up by 46 percent while registration by people of color is up by only 4 percent. That gap is made more stark when you realize that over the last four years, the WNC (white non-college) population has increased by only 1 percent in those states, while the number of people of color increased by 13 percent.
The pattern was more pronounced in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin than it was in Michigan.
On its own, increased registration among non-college whites would have only a negligible effect on total state voting, my source pointed out, but
it becomes troubling if it reflects greater interest more generally for these voters in those states. And there are good reasons to believe that if that is the case, those additionally energized voters are very underrepresented in surveys now.
Those registration numbers are as worrying as yard signs are to my wandering friend.
Signs may not vote. But they are an indication of voter enthusiasm. We saw a similar phenomenon here in 2016. A wealthy Bernie supporter here was so unnerved by the presence of Trump signs (in the absence of Clinton’s) that he himself printed and fabricated thousands of 1/4-size “Clinton 2016” signs. Democrats snatched them up in days.
Edsall also considers the potential risk that using absentee ballots poses to Democratic voters considering they are prone to “disqualification for errors, large and small.” (See Pennsylvania’s “naked ballots.”) An August WSJ/NBC poll showed only 11 percent of Trump supporters planned to vote by mail compared with 47 percent of Biden voters. Seen another way, absentee ballot voters support Biden over Trump by 74-20, and Election Day voters favor Trump by 62-30. Watch those rejection rates and follow absentee ballot directions to the letter.
Edsall acknowledges that, “Despite these warning signs, Biden is better positioned than Trump with six weeks to go.” Great. And not great enough.
A friend in South Carolina just found out that having applied for an absentee ballot, she forgoes the option to vote in person. (You have that option in North Carolina.) But it made me look at dates for absentee processing there.
Per NCSL, South Carolina cannot begin processing absentee ballots until Election Day. The same is true in the swing states of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. We know Acting @POTUS @realDonaldTrump and his party mean to dispute votes counted after Nov. 3, so any Biden voters in those states who feel they can vote early or an Election Day should do so, both to avoid absentee rejection and RNC litigation.
There is no early voting in bright red South Carolina, so that makes a bad situation worse for Harrison supporters.
Nervous voters asked me four years ago what the chances were that Donald Trump could win. As ineffective as Hillary Clinton’s ground game appeared, I assured them (and believed) there was no way Trump would win. Americans were just not that crazy:
Then I greeted voters outside a nearby polling place on Election Day. A smiling woman wearing a thick, black shawl in seventy-degree weather offered Republican voters a list of “pro-life, pro-Israel, constitution and liberty” candidates. Occasionally, she raised her arms and talked to the cloudless sky.
The rest — and 200,000 dead and counting — is history. Please, do not get so caught up playing defense that you forget to play offense. Register new voters. Turn them out. Volunteer. Hit the phones. Eyes on the prize. Don’t get beat again by Talks To The Sky.
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Trump said we used to be a laughingstock, which was wrong. People around the world had mixed feelings about the US but they weren’t laughing at us. I think they had a good chuckle when we elected Donald Trump as president through a fluke in our ridiculous election system.
But now it’s so bad, they feel sorry for us:
President Donald Trump’s former top Russia adviser said Tuesday that the United States is increasingly seen as “an object of pity” and its standing on the world stage is eroding.
“We are increasingly seen as an object of pity, including by our allies, because they are so shocked by what’s happening internally, how we’re eating ourselves alive with our divisions,”
Fiona Hill, who was a witness in the Trump impeachment hearings, told CNN’s Jim Sciutto on Tuesday during the Citizen by CNN 2020 conference. “We’re the ones who are creating all this. It’s not the Russians or the Chinese or anyone else. We are doing this to ourselves.”
Asked whether the US is still seen as a model, Hill replied, “Unless we get our domestic act together, no.”
Her comments come on the heels of a recent Pew Research Center survey among 13 nations that found America’s reputation has declined further over the past year among its key allies, with part of the decline linked to the United States’ response to the coronavirus pandemic.
In case anyone might be confused, impeachment is in the constitution just as the Senate’s “advise and consent” on Supreme Court appointments is in the Constitution. Pelosi has just as much authority to initiate impeachment as Mitch McConnell has to refuse to hold a vote on a president’s nomination as he did with Garland and ram through a Handmaid’s Tale Justice days before the election.
None of this has anything to do with “undoing” Article II, which the Trump people, under the tutelage of Bill Barr, has turned into a magical clause that conveys total authority to the president. Here’s a reminder of what Article II, Section II actually says:
The President shall have Power to fill up all Vacancies that may happen during the Recess of the Senate, by granting Commissions which shall expire at the End of their next Session.
Sure, an impeachment proceeding might slow down the confirmation process in the senate. Oh heck. Barack Obama’s appointment sat for 8 months without even getting a hearing and McConnell got his Gorsuch. Obviously, a slow-down is not an assault on Article II.
I can’t believe I just had to waste my time and yours on yet another ridiculous rationalization for their shameless, radical, abandonment of any sense of fairness, due process,norms and rules. BUt it illustrates the fact that Democrats have got to recognize that their adversaries are intent upon ruling from the minority, which means they will use every lever of power to enact their agenda regardless of the fact that they do not represent any more than 40% of the country at best.
This is not democracy and the Democrats need to understand that the concept of “majority rule but protect the minority” is being abused in ways that are destroying the country. They simply cannot allow this to continue or we’re over.
Democrats need to avoid hysteria and calmly start saving democracy. If they lose this one, which they will, they have to win big and then proceed to re-balance the system so that this nihilistic, power-mad, white nationalist minority cannot rule the country from the bench.
"Our weapons are at an advanced level like we've never had before. Like frankly we've never even thought of having before. And I only pray to God that we never have to use them." — Aaron pic.twitter.com/EebgJF0usT
Your pacifist isolationist president “praying” we don’t have to use our vast arsenal of weapons of mass destruction. Since he’s such a stable genius I feel so safe.
Investigation into a $1 billion fund allotted by Congress to the Pentagon in March to bolster the country’s supplies of medical equipment reveals that the funds have been mostly diverted to defense contractors and used to manufacture military equipment like jet engine parts, body armor and dress uniforms.
The Washington Post reported the finding which demonstrates how a taxpayer-based effort to combat COVID-19 was redirected to stockpiling military supplies.
Passed earlier this year, the Cares Act distributed funds to the Pentagon to “prevent, prepare for, and respond to coronavirus.” But per the Post, in a matter of weeks, the Defense Department began reshaping how that money would be used — diverging from the original intent of Congress for the funds.
The payments were made despite warnings from health officials as recently as last week that suggested there continue to be major funding gaps in responding to the pandemic. CDC director Robert Redfield, testified to the Senate last week that states desperately need $6 billion to distribute vaccines to Americans early next year.
The funds could also be used to fill what continues to be a severe shortage of N95 masks at some hospitals knees-deep in their fight against the virus. But in the months after the stimulus package was passed, the Pentagon made other plans for the money.
According to the Post’s report, the Pentagon instead decided to give defense contractors hundreds of millions of dollars from the fund, mostly for projects that have little to do with the coronavirus response. Defense Department lawyers quickly determined that the funds could be used for defense production, a conclusion that Congress later disputed.
The N95 shortage America can’t seem to fix: Nurses and doctors depend on respirator masks to protect them from covid-19. So why are we still running low on an item that once cost around $1?
