- Walter Shaub, who formerly ran the Office of Government Ethics, posted a long thread about the recent firings of Inspectors General. Not summarizing it here. You should read it.
- HHS has announced the government is using the DPA to contract with GM to make ventilators. 6,132 of them will be delivered June 1 with the rest not available until August. This should have been done months ago. It also illustrates the government is preparing for the outbreak to last through the summer.
- The federal government has seized shipments of medical supplies to hospitals in at least seven states. As for supplies coming in from abroad, FEMA is sending half of those to the states and the other half to commercial sellers which then sell to the states. This has never happened before.
- The intelligence community was warning the White House in November of the coronavirus threat. Trump has repeatedly said that no one could have seen this coming. He ignored preparatory materials prevented to his administration and ignored warnings from multiple areas of government once the virus began to spread.
- While dismissing letting people vote by mail today, Trump said a court case involving the state of California and Judicial Watch showed that a million people voted illegally in 2016 there. This is a frequent lie the president tells. The case resulted in California purging people from their voter rolls. These were not examples of people voting illegally. Voter fraud remains exceedingly rare, even by mail. One of the only notable cases recently was in a North Carolina primary – the Republican primary. The president tweeted out that states with elective mail-in voting use a different system than military and absentee ballots. This isn’t true.
- Attorney General Barr said on Fox News tonight said our current distancing policies are too draconian and need to be eased at the end of the month. He also pushed the drug hydroxychloroquine which currently lacks any evidence showing improvement for Covid-19 cases. The United States, which adopted distancing policies late, is now at 432,132 total cases. South Korea, which found their first infection on the same day as the US and adopted distancing policies quickly, is now at 10,423 total cases.
