Franklin Foer writes:

When Kushner showed up for work on March 11, he was summoned by Mike Pence. The vice president had been designated by Trump to preside over the government’s response to the virus. With the economy on the verge of collapse, his efforts could hardly be characterized as a triumph. Now Pence dumped the problem on Kushner’s desk. As he grasped the magnitude of the challenge before him, Kushner is said to have felt an uncharacteristic jolt of anxiety; he wondered to himself whether he was up to the task. But it was what the president wanted, and he was determined not to let Trump down.

The next morning, Kushner texted an old friend, Adam Boehler, the head of the International Development Finance Corporation. Two decades earlier, they had roomed together in NYU dorms while interning at investment banks. Before entering the government, Boehler had sold a health-care company he’d founded. Like Kushner, he prides himself on pushing his bureaucratic deputies to move with entrepreneurial alacrity.

Boehler received Kushner’s text at breakfast. By that afternoon, they had summoned a group of officials to a West Wing office and begun to act on a plan they had hastily sketched. Aides were assigned to three different teams focused on resolving crucial shortages: One would ramp up testing; the others would procure ventilators and personal protective equipment, respectively. The teams were instructed to descend on FEMA and the Department of Health and Human Services and act like management consultants, injecting unorthodox thinking and imposing a bias for action. In the days that followed, Kushner and Boehler supplemented the group with volunteers recruited from the private sector—from consulting firms, private equity, and the health-care industry. According to The New York Times, rivalrous bureaucrats referred to these recruits as the “Slim-Suit Crowd.”

Under pressure to reverse the perception of a flailing White House, Kushner’s group improvised wildly. The day after they were first assembled at the White House, they organized a Rose Garden event, where the president unveiled plans for a website that Google was said to be constructing. The site was billed as a hub for locating the drive-through testing centers that would soon populate the country. At the time, such plans were barely notional; Google, for one, was reportedly caught off guard by the announcement, which dramatically overstated the site’s ambitions and the company’s involvement. But the Slim Suits had little time to get their bearings, let alone meticulously design national policy.

And indeed, for a fleeting moment, Kushner’s group did better than its critics would admit. In the face of emotional governors clamoring for the shipment of ventilators to their states, the Slim Suits devised a formula for anticipating demand for the equipment, which helped the United States avoid the rationing of machinery that plagued Italian hospitals. They imported PPE from abroad and opened dozens of drive-through testing sites in a matter of days. By April, Kushner was publicly congratulating the administration on its “great success story.” He prophesied that by July, the country could be “really rocking again.”

But by July, the nation was manifestly not rocking. Kushner had expanded testing, but, according to recent reporting by Vanity Fair, he also seems to have stifled the development of infrastructure that could have matched the scale of the problem. The Slim Suits had conceived an intricate blueprint for a robust testing and contact-tracing regime—a set of policies that likely would have helped slow the spread of the virus across the nation. But instead of executing those plans, Kushner appears to have permitted them to wither. And as the president claimed the virus would miraculously disappear, politicized the wearing of masks, and held an indoor campaign rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, that contravened the administration’s own recommendations, Kushner offered no public words of contradiction or caution.

Despite his initial anxieties, Kushner had demonstrated the technocratic skill to take on the pandemic. In the end, what he lacked wasn’t competence, but the courage to challenge his father-in-law’s fantasies. [Continue reading…]