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"I don't know how our government operates anymore," said one Republican close to the administration, lamenting that the sudden authority granted to non-governmental actors had left them with their "eyebrow raised unbelievably high."

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Kushner has relied on select officials, including his one-time former roommate and current U.S. foreign investment czar Adam Boehler, and Brad Smith, the head of Medicare's innovation center, to organize and manage key projects -- bypassing the bureaucratic structures and internal rivalries that slowed progress in the response's early months.

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Nonetheless, the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, which has already warned that Kushner's operation could violate federal recordkeeping laws, blasted the White House for its extensive reliance on the private sector and lack of transparency.

"They're not necessarily doing something nefarious, but if they were, this is what they would do to hide it," CREW spokesperson Jordan Libowitz said.

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"I don't know how our government operates anymore," said one Republican close to the administration, lamenting that the sudden authority granted to non-governmental actors had left them with their "eyebrow raised unbelievably high."

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Originally posted by pianojuggler:
I am concerned.

My biggest concern with Jared involved is that resources will likely be prioritized to the states and areas that his FIL thinks "treat him nicely", and for the 1% who already have their own separate and superior healthcare system.

Like his FIL, the Kushner mindset is that everything is transactional. Everything is "a deal". That's not how healthcare should be.

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Originally posted by Mikhailoh:

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Kushner has relied on select officials, including his one-time former roommate and current U.S. foreign investment czar Adam Boehler, and Brad Smith, the head of Medicare's innovation center, to organize and manage key projects -- bypassing the bureaucratic structures and internal rivalries that slowed progress in the response's early months.

you have a problem with this?

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Yet the co-mingling of administration aides and private-sector executives has led to new quandaries, according to health officials and even some of the outside advisers working with Kushner. Projects are so decentralized that one team often has little idea what others are doing — outside of that they all report up to Kushner. People around Kushner are fielding all manner of outside pitches, making it difficult for the group to stay focused.

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And there is limited vetting of private companies' and executives' financial interests, raising questions about the motivations and potential conflicts inherent in an operation that relies on an ill-defined and ever-expanding group of outside contributors.

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Nonetheless, the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, which has already warned that Kushner's operation could violate federal recordkeeping laws, blasted the White House for its extensive reliance on the private sector and lack of transparency.

"They're not necessarily doing something nefarious, but if they were, this is what they would do to hide it," CREW spokesperson Jordan Libowitz said.

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"I don't know how our government operates anymore," said one Republican close to the administration, lamenting that the sudden authority granted to non-governmental actors had left them with their "eyebrow raised unbelievably high."

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Peter T. Gaynor, the federal government’s top emergency manager, was about to go on television last week to announce that he would use wartime production powers to ensure the manufacture of about 60,000 desperately needed coronavirus test kits.

With minutes until the camera went live, though, he still had to let the White House know. The person he hurriedly called: Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and senior adviser, who endorsed an announcement that surprised many officials. Among those unaware that Mr. Kushner had agreed to the use of the special powers? President Trump.

At one of the most perilous moments in modern American history, Mr. Kushner is trying in a disjointed White House to marshal the forces of government for the war his father-in-law says he is waging. A real estate developer with none of the medical expertise of a public health official nor the mobilization experience of a general, Mr. Kushner has nonetheless become a key player in the response to the pandemic.

Because of his unique status, he has made himself the point of contact for many agency officials who know that he can force action and issue decisions without going to the president. But while Mr. Kushner and his allies say that he has brought more order to the process, the government’s response remains fragmented and behind the curve.

Some officials said Mr. Kushner had mainly added another layer of confusion to that response, while taking credit for changes already in progress and failing to deliver on promised improvements. He promoted a nationwide screening website and a widespread network of drive-through testing sites. Neither materialized. He claimed to have helped narrow the rift between his father-in-law and General Motors in a presidential blowup over ventilator production, one administration official said, but the White House is still struggling to procure enough ventilators and other medical equipment.

Perhaps most critical, neither Mr. Kushner nor anyone else can control a president who offers the public radically different messages depending on the day or even the hour, complicating the White House’s effort to get ahead of the crisis. One moment Mr. Trump is talking about reopening the country by Easter, the next he is warning of more than 100,000 deaths. In the afternoon, he threatens to quarantine tens of millions of people in the Northeast, then in the evening he backs down.

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But to some in the agencies, his team’s arrival has only exacerbated an already dysfunctional situation. In recent days, administration officials said, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which traditionally coordinates the government’s responses to disasters, has received surprise directives from the White House — including to dispatch deliveries of medical equipment to states that had not even submitted formal requests based on which governor got Mr. Trump on the telephone.

After the governors of Illinois and New Jersey called Mr. Trump last month, Mr. Kushner’s team told FEMA to immediately deliver medical equipment to both states even though the career officials were concerned that would redirect valuable medical necessities away from where they were most needed, such as the coronavirus hot spot of Washington State. Agency officials had to call the states’ emergency managers to ask them to submit formal requests for supplies the White House had already promised.

“There is some kind of communications failure between FEMA and the White House,” said Representative Bennie G. Thompson, Democrat of Mississippi and chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee. “FEMA was brought into the response to provide logistics support and the White House should let them do their work. There is no reason for Jared or any other inexperienced person to be getting in the way of that.”

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The culture clash between public and private sectors has been jarring. The senior official described the Kushner team as a “frat party” that descended from a U.F.O. and invaded the federal government. To government officials, the outsiders demonstrated a lax attitude to policy discussions, at one point using the website FreeConferenceCall.com to arrange high-level meetings. Others have used personal email accounts in delicate policy exchanges.

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The emergency situation has also led to questions about the merging of private and public interests. Some producers of the malaria drug chloroquine who know Mr. Kushner have invoked his name with administration officials to press for a quicker means of production on the unproven coronavirus treatment promoted by Mr. Trump.

After the president, at Mr. Kushner’s urging, made a splashy announcement last month that Google was helping build a national screening website to direct Americans to testing locations, it turned out there was no such national site anywhere close to being unveiled by Google.

But Oscar Health, a health insurance company founded in part by Mr. Kushner’s younger brother, Joshua, did work on such a website at the government’s request before dropping the project, according to The Atlantic. Jared Kushner partly owned or controlled Oscar before joining the White House and Joshua Kushner remains a major investor in the firm, as does Google’s parent company.

Mr. Trump, according to two people familiar with the events, unleashed his fury at Mr. Kushner over the debacle related to the Google website the weekend after his announcement, a level of anger that the president’s son-in-law has rarely endured and that seemed to knock him off balance briefly. (Mr. Kushner’s allies insist Mr. Trump calmed down and moved on once Google issued a statement about the website.)

Weeks later, the website that was eventually developed by another firm owned by Google’s parent company still operates in only four California counties. Likewise, Mr. Kushner’s effort to open an array of drive-through testing sites has resulted in just five locations, at a Rite Aid in Pennsylvania, two Walmarts and a Walgreens in the Chicago area and a CVS in Massachusetts, each of which were set up to run only 250 tests a day, according to two government officials.