Great Having A Top-Notch Businessman And His Cronies In The White House
The Trump administration paid a price four times higher for ventilators than the Obama admin had already contracted for, write Patricia Callahan and Sebastian Rotella at Propublica. Trump's peeps were "gullible" and didn't negotiate in the slightest:

A U.S. subsidiary of Royal Philips N.V. received millions in federal tax dollars years ago to develop a low-cost ventilator for pandemics but didn't deliver it. Instead, as the coronavirus began spreading around the globe and U.S. hospitals were desperate for more, Philips was selling commercial versions of the government-funded ventilator overseas from its Pennsylvania factory. Then in April, despite having not fulfilled the initial contract, the Dutch company struck a much more lucrative deal to sell the government 43,000 ventilators for four times the price.

Under this new deal, ventilators that the Obama administration had agreed to buy for $3,280 each suddenly cost $15,000. When the deal was announced in April, neither HHS nor Philips would say how the more expensive ventilators differed from the cheaper ones.

It turns out that they were "functionally identical," according to investigators with the House Committee on Oversight and Reform's Subcommittee on Economic and Consumer Policy, and the "waste of taxpayer funds" may have reached $500 million.

The investigators reviewed thousands of pages of emails and other records obtained from Philips and concluded that "inept contract management and incompetent negotiating by the Trump Administration denied the country the ventilators it needed." And the subcommittee's report, which it shared with the inspector general's office, named names: Peter Navarro, President Donald Trump's director of trade and manufacturing policy, was the administration's point man on the deal. In addition, Jared Kushner, the president's son-in-law and senior adviser, and HHS Secretary Alex Azar participated in calls with Philips' executives.

Details:

Among the most surprising findings of the investigation was an email communication between the company and the government on the day the U.S. reported its first coronavirus case. On Jan. 21, a Philips manager sent a news story about that case to an HHS contracting officer and asked "how we could help out or if you may expect a need to accelerate any shipments." Yet nobody from the federal government responded to Philips for six weeks, the investigators found.

On March 4, the HHS contracting officer told Philips managers in an email that Azar's office had directed him to "expedite production of the ventilators." Philips responded the same day suggesting a contract modification "to allow for the earlier shipments."

Rather than speed up delivery, though, the modification Philips suggested gave the company until September 2022 to deliver any of the stockpile ventilators. Still, HHS signed off on the deal, the investigators found.

"Philips appears to have duped the Administration into thinking that this amendment, which permits a lengthy delay, was necessary for it to expedite production," the congressional investigators wrote.

That same month, as the administration sought to cut a new deal, a Philips executive shared with Azar the slide deck he planned to present to Navarro. In the presentation, Philips described the government-funded stockpile ventilator design as "the best solution to confront exactly the pandemic we are facing."

However, Philips soon steered Navarro and his colleagues to a more expensive option, the $15,000 Trilogy EV300, saying in one email to an associate director in Navarro's office that this hospital ventilator had "more clinician friendly screens."

Yet, the House investigators found the screens of the pricier model were identical to the less-expensive stockpile version. "The Administration's willingness to spend hundreds of millions of extra dollars for non-existent 'more clinician-friendly screens' constitutes waste," they wrote.

The White House negotiators were "gullible," the investigators wrote, "and conceded to Philips on all significant matters, including price." The contract called for Philips to make monthly deliveries between April and December 2020 with more than half arriving in the final three months.

"Gullible."

Nobody's money spends like other people's money.

So many people are actually "self-servants" who get elected to public service and basically phone the job in.

This probably happens in all administrations, much as I am not a fan of the orange man and these, yes, gullible, cavalier-with-public-money twits.