A Silicon Valley C.E.O., Jared Kushner, and the race to get P.P.E. for America’s hospitals.
On Saturday, March 21st, while Donald Trump was tweeting about the “Chinese virus” and circulating praise for the “great job we’ve done,” Eric Ries received a phone call from another Silicon Valley C.E.O. His friend Jeff Lawson, of the firm Twilio, told Ries that, to deal with the rapidly escalating coronavirus crisis, the White House was recruiting tech executives to help. Ries—the founder and C.E.O. of a new company, the Long-Term Stock Exchange, and the author of a best-selling book, “The Lean Startup,” which had made him a well-known figure in the Valley—was an obvious choice for someone looking to stand up a high-tech solution to the disaster quickly. He had long preached the virtues of going to market as fast as possible with what he called M.V.P.: minimum viable product.
America was watching, shocked, as doctors and nurses pleaded for protective gear and medical equipment such as ventilators. Ries was asked to help start a Web site that would match hospitals and suppliers. Sure, Ries said, he could have something up and running by Monday.
Ries’s first phone conversation demonstrated how awry things had gone. He reached out to a White House contact, and, when he mentioned the Trump Administration’s coronavirus task force that was asking for Silicon Valley’s help, the response was, “Which one?” Trump had enlisted his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, to help with the pandemic response, and his murky new effort, which was not yet public, was already seen as working at cross-purposes with the official task force, overseen by Vice-President Mike Pence. Ries also learned that the Web site he had been asked to create was, in fact, not needed. “It took me three hours on the phone to realize the world did not need another Web site to solve the problem,” Ries told me.
For ten days running, Ries was told that the Federal Emergency Management Agency would step in and take charge of distributing critical supplies, directing them to where they were most needed, but, as far as he could tell, it never happened. Kushner and his team had embedded at fema, along with a Navy rear admiral, John Polowczyk, to oversee the supply-chain crisis, but Ries managed only to speak with an aide to the admiral.
Eventually, at a White House briefing last week that will surely go down as one of the Administration’s most callous performances, Kushner said publicly what he had in effect told Ries’s Silicon Valley contacts a couple weeks earlier, in a private phone call with business leaders and government officials: the states were responsible, and the U.S. national stockpile was ours, not theirs. The President agreed. Governors should have prepared their states while there was still time. “We’re a backup. We’re not an ordering clerk,” Trump said at the same news conference.