Covid aid scams could have been avoided

Almost every scam is a little bit funny, even when linked to the deadly serious coronavirus. Consider BuzzFeed’s latest installment in the genre:
The site reported that Yaron Oren-Pines, an electrical engineer in Silicon Valley, managed to make millions of dollars selling ventilators he apparently never had and never could supply. Three days — three days! — after he tweeted to President Donald Trump, “We can supply ICU Ventilators, invasive and noninvasive. Have someone call me URGENT,” New York State paid him $69.1 million for 1,450 ventilators. BuzzFeed noted that amounted to $47,656 for each ventilator — or at least three times the normal price of high-end ventilators.
New York officials told BuzzFeed that Oren-Pines seemed credible because he came recommended by a crack team of experts: the White House’s coronavirus task force. The team is led by Vice President Mike Pence and includes Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, Surgeon General Jerome Adams, Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar, National Economic Council Director Larry Kudlow and others. (After BuzzFeed published its report, Pence’s office said the task force wasn’t involved in the ventilator contract; New York said it canceled the contract and got most of its money back.)
Oren-Pines doesn’t appear to have a background in medical supplies or government contracting, but he was loaded with good old-fashioned ambition. “He’s always a go-getter,” a friend told BuzzFeed. “Anytime there’s opportunity, he’s always been out there trying to help and make a buck.”
This one has all of the makings
of “funny”: outrageous behaviour, stupidity, gullibility, ribald incompetence and many unanswered what-the-hells.
That’s not to say that L’Affaire Oren-Pines also isn’t obscene and disturbing. It’s got it all. And it’s proof that a vacuum in federal coordination and leadership and a dearth of supplies have forced governors across the country to procure medical equipment in a Wild West environment.
Confronted with a global pandemic and routine second-guessing from the left and right, they’ve had to scramble for solutions and have sometimes rushed into ill-considered contracts.
It’s also a reminder that the public response to the coronavirus is gilded — $2.6 trillion in spending from the federal government alone — and yet it already has far too many Keystone Kops moments, and far too little sophisticated oversight, than anyone should be
comfortable with. The Treasury Department and Small Business Administration’s multiple fiascos surrounding the $669 billion Paycheck Protection Program offered some of the first examples of this. Federal and state contracting whodunits, such as the one featuring Oren-Pines, are an example of another fresh stream of problems that is likely to run much deeper given what we’ve already seen.
Representative Katie Porter, a California Democrat, flagged this in a recent op-ed published in the Washington Post. Contracts procured under the Defense Production Act aren’t, like most federal contracts, public documents. This winds up “leaving Americans in the dark about one of the administration’s key tools in its Covid-19
response,” Porter wrote.
—Bloomberg