The coronavirus crisis is far from over and along with the horrifying new case counts comes the confirmation of what we all knew from watching it: The Trump administration has failed at just about every level, from providing enough tests to ensuring supplies and equipment to the states and hospitals to distributing the trillions in funding that Congress has provided so far. A new report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO) gives the government an "A-ish" on effort, and an "F" on the rest. "Both the Congress and the administration have acted to mobilize resources quickly to help the nation respond to and recover from the pandemic. However, the negative effects of the pandemic on families, communities, and health care systems and on the long-term economic condition of millions of Americans and U.S. businesses are likely to persist into the future," the report says.
It described how the Strategic National Stockpile had not been maintained and was not equipped to respond to demand. Officials told the GAO that "the Strategic National Stockpile did not have the capacity to provide states with supplies at the scale necessary to respond to a nationwide event such as the COVID-19 pandemic," and while Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar was aware of that and in fact testified to Congress about it, funding wasn't allocated to replenish it. The report also says the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has failed at testing, compiling "incomplete and inconsistent" testing data that "has made it more difficult to track and know the infection rate, mitigate the effect of infections, and inform decisions on reopening communities." The report doesn't address, apparently, Donald Trump’s efforts to interfere in all of this and muck it all up.
The funding that has been provided by Congress has been mismanaged, the GAO says. In just one example that's received some media attention, the IRS either wasn't authorized to or simply did not cross-reference stimulus check recipients with Social Security records so $1.4 billion went to dead people—or in most cases, their descendants. It also points out that many states were completely unprepared for processing unemployment claims, including the additional $600-per-week boost. It found that "states with UI information technology systems that date as far back as the 1970s have reported crashes due to the current claims volumes." It reported that while the Department of Labor "has assisted states' efforts to modernize their UI systems in recent years by, for example, providing grants, technical assistance, and guidance, relatively few states had load-tested their systems for the current volume of claims, according to representatives of state workforce agencies."
The GAO also harshly criticized the Small Business Administration for withholding information. "Congress has charged SBA with implementing the PPP [the Paycheck Protection Program] and other provisions crucial to the nation's economic recovery," GAO wrote. "However, SBA to date has failed to provide information critical to our review, including a detailed description of data on loans made. The agency provided primarily publicly available information in response to our inquiries. SBA officials met with GAO in the beginning of June to discuss questions we had provided about 6 weeks earlier. […] Most agencies were generally able to provide GAO timely access to information for this report while executing their responsibilities during this unprecedented national crisis," GAO wrote. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin is trying to keep much of that information secret. (Disclosure: Kos Media received a Paycheck Protection Program loan.)
GAO said that "lenders had made about 4.6 million loans totaling about $512 billion" but had not provided any information to loan recipients about how the loans could be forgiven until most of the loans had already been made. It also said that a rush to give the money out left the program vulnerable to fraud. "Because of the number of loans approved, the speed with which they were processed, and the limited safeguards, there is a significant risk that some fraudulent or inflated applications were approved. In addition, the lack of clear guidance has increased the likelihood that borrowers may misuse loan proceeds or be surprised they do not qualify for full loan forgiveness," the GAO wrote.
It's worth pointing out that while a competent administration would have undoubtedly done a much better job and shrunk the scope of this disaster, many of the problems were built in from past administrations and past Congresses. The deficit mania that took hold decades ago has resulted in things like 50-year-old tech systems, inadequate staffing to quickly carry out massive programs in an effective way, and a starved government that just can't meet the demands on it. When we're back to normal (if that even still exists) with a normal president and Congress, one of the first orders of business will be to reinvest and rebuild the infrastructure of government at every level.
In the meantime, an incompetent head is rotting the entire fish that is government, and that's a problem. Job No. 1 will be replacing him.