In further news of the Trump team's blazing, no-holds-barred incompetence, The Washington Post reported Saturday on still another dropped ball in the earliest days of the pandemic: In late January, the owner of the American medical supply company Prestige Ameritech contacted the Department of Health And Human Services to let it know that the company could ramp up N95 mask production by 1.7 million masks per week, if it proved needed. It would be "very difficult" to get the then-mothballed machines running again, but it could be done "in a dire situation."
Not only did the administration not see fit to help the company do that, despite numerous government experts sounding dire warnings that masks were in short supply and were going to be urgently needed—even now, it still hasn't. And it all smells more than a little fishy, to be honest. There's no question that we still need many more masks, and Trump has gone so far as to invoke the Defense Production Act to order companies to manufacture them. But not this company.
As is usual for this administration, the details as to why Trump's team could not be mustered into action are now (ahem) somewhat in dispute. An anonymous "senior" government official told the Post that it was a legitimate offer but that HHS "didn't have the money" to do it; this seems the incontrovertibly true part, evinced by Bright's unsuccessful early quest to try to procure masks by tapping into funds for other "biodefense measures" that were not as immediately urgent.
White House economic adviser Peter Navarro, however, is suggesting that the company was "extremely difficult to work and communicate with," compared to the Trump team's now-preferred companies; this almost assuredly is not the full story. Whatever else could be said about Prestige owner Michael Bowen, the man seems unquestionably to have been on a 13-year tear to convince government to purchase his American-made masks, and went out of his way to warn the government that he was suddenly getting enormous orders for masks from China and Hong Kong—thus giving officials an even stronger clue that U.S. mask supplies were indeed going to be a near-term problem.
Reading between the lines, it seems that Bowen found the right people and made the right case, including to Navarro himself, but that the administration simply botched all follow-up. Instead, the company was put into the bureaucratic hopper of potential mask providers, sent a form letter, and that was that. Also reading between the lines, it sounds much like the major problem was that the company's offer simply came during the looooong period of time when the Trump White House was actively hostile toward doing anything that might publicly suggest the pandemic would be more severe than Dear Leader's own burpings claimed it would be, so there simply was no White House or HHS stomach for contradicting him.
(Also, Jared Kushner somehow managed to become involved in medical equipment procurement, along with two dozen or so "volunteers" with no particular experience for procuring anything, and the amount of things this government has done competently when Jared Kushner is even marginally involved continues to be zero point zero.)
Cut to the present, and the company still hasn't restarted those dormant machines, even as other companies with little or no experience in making the same masks land expensive contracts with a now-desperate government. Reading between the lines yet again, it appears that Bowen's eventual impatience with the administration's uberbunglers pissed someone in the Trump administration off: If you're not polishing every Team Trump shoe you are not going to be seen as an administration ally, worldwide deadly pandemic or no worldwide deadly pandemic, and now that the company has given Trump bad publicity it’s likely to rise rapidly up Trump’s hundred-page enemies list.
The Honeywell people, though, now they were willing to play the White House game. Apparently.