you are viewing a single comment's thread.

view the rest of the comments →

[–]Nemacolin[S] 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

It is hard to imagine President Trump donating anything to anyone.

The Trump administration spent $200 million to send more than 8,700 ventilators to countries around the world last year, with no clear criteria for determining who should get them and no way to keep track of where many ended up, according to a new report from the Government Accountability Office.

The effort, driven by the Trump White House, was an unusual top-down initiative with little decision-making by experts at the U.S. Agency for International Development, which carried out the administration’s orders. President Donald Trump last year boasted about U.S. success in manufacturing the machines and declared the U.S. “the king of ventilators,” promising donations to foreign countries.

Staff on the White House’s National Security Council communicated to the aid agency “U.S. government decisions regarding ventilator donations, including the recipient countries, quantities, and manufacturers,” the GAO found.

“These ventilators were not in State or AID’s strategic plan,” said David Gootnick, director of international affairs and trade at GAO. “They could not articulate for us the criteria they used for what ventilators went to what countries.”

The GAO was unable to identify how the Trump White House made its decisions on ventilator allocations, and White House officials did not respond to the watchdog’s questions, which came before President Biden took office last week. For instance, while Sri Lanka had just three new coronavirus cases per day when it received 200 ventilators, Bangladesh, which had 1,409 new cases, received just 100 of the machines, the report found.

Relatively wealthy recipients such as Italy and St. Kitts and Nevis also received ventilator donations, as did tiny island nations such as Nauru and Kiribati, which have yet to report a single coronavirus case.