White House senior adviser Jared Kushner pushed back against complaints by watchdogs about his ‘shadow’ coronavirus task force and its “entrepreneurial approach,” an effort they say operates with little public oversight.
The effort operates in parallel to Vice President Mike Pence’s official task force. But watchdogs complained that laws might be being violated because, where members of Pence’s team join Trump most nights to brief journalists on their plans and findings, Kushner’s crew of public officials and private sector individuals is mostly out of sight, and private sector members are using private email to communicate about government business, according to reports.
“The president instructed me [to] knock down every barrier needed to make sure that the teams can succeed,” Kushner said on Thursday about his efforts to mobilize resources quickly and efficiently. “This is an effort to make sure that the government is doing things that the government doesn’t normally do, where we’re stretching, where [we] are acting very quickly,” said Kushner during an unusual appearance at the task force briefing.
To illustrate this, Kushner explained that Trump called him early Thursday morning to tell him that the New York hospital system was running low on critical supplies. Working under the auspices of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, Kushner’s team fast-tracked a commitment to send the city a month’s supply of N95 masks from the federal inventory, Kushner said. “We’ll be doing the same with all the other hot spot zones,” he added.
Kushner’s approach has drawn ire from an ethics watchdog that has charged that his private sector workers appear to violate the Presidential Records Act, which requires executive office staff preserve records of their government work, and the Federal Advisory Committee Act, which seeks to stem undue influence by special interests.
“Mr. Kushner’s shadow task force appears to be violating key aspects of the PRA, and his use of it implicates the FACA’s public transparency provisions,” Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington Executive Director Noah Bookbinder wrote in a letter to White House counsel Pat Cipollone.
Kushner took pains to stress that his efforts came at the request of the vice president, pushing back on reports that his team was acting outside the bounds of the task force. The two speak “probably five, 10 times a day,” he said, adding that he is in regular contact with the task force’s highly visible public health experts.
“I can assure you, I’m speaking with [task force coordinator] Dr. Birx, [National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director] Dr. Fauci, the vice president, and the president to make sure that I’m accomplishing and focusing on the objectives that the vice president deems a priority,” he said.
Trump pushed back on the allegations by unnamed White House officials: “Or they don’t exist. The fake sources don’t exist.”
A member of Kushner’s team suggested the group was expediting the response. “The trick has been just trying to cut through it all,” the Kushner detailee said about the bureaucratic obstacles that get in the way of a speedy response. “You’ve got all these camps.”
Enacted after Watergate, the PRA requires a presidential administration to retain all “documentary material” of the “activities, deliberations, decisions, and policies that reflect the performance of the President’s constitutional, statutory, or other official or ceremonial duties.”
The use of private email addresses to email large numbers of government employees creates security concerns and sows further confusion, Bookbinder wrote.
The FACA rule requires committees with nongovernmental employees advising the president to disclose “records, reports, transcripts, minutes, appendixes, working papers, drafts, studies, agenda, or other documents which were made available to or prepared for or by” them.
Kushner’s team of federal and nongovernmental staffers advising the White House coronavirus pandemic response “implicates the FACA,” Bookbinder’s letter said.
Officials insisted they are following the rules.
“People signed voluntary service agreements that were vetted by career legal professionals,” one senior administration official directly involved told Politico, adding that government officials were “doing procurement.”
One senior White House official told the Washington Post: “We don’t know who these people are. Who is this? We’re all getting these emails.”
Speaking to Politico, one HHS official involved in the pandemic response said the outsiders were duplicating some internal work. “It’s not great to have people coming in and replacing people who are working on this,” this official said, noting how the new team rendered some existing health department data teams unnecessary.
“I don’t know how our government operates anymore,” a Republican close to the White House told Politico, questioning the rapid ascendance of industry outsiders working on behalf of the administration, circumstances that draw skepticism or an “eyebrow raised unbelievably high.”
The United States, as of Thursday afternoon, reported more than 226,300 cases of COVID-19, with more than 5,300 deaths, according to Johns Hopkins University.
The White House did not respond to a request for comment.
