C.R. Rivera
Popper @ his favorite toy.
An example of this is the two US Navy hospital ships. New York, Washington, and California all requested one but someone was going to be disappointed. What you had was each governor arguing somewhat "that my population is better than your population." The Navy, and I am retired Navy, and the administration was going to draw heat on this question anyway.In terms of the federal government vs states:
As my governor Andrew Cuomo says more than once every day, he is bidding against other governors. He wants to pay $4 for a mask, another bids $5, then another governor bids $6. They are all bidding against the federal government. This is not the way to do things, and it will cost a lot of lives.
All this purchasing of medical supplies should be done by the federal government and then dispersed according to need. My state, New York, has half of the cases, but we got 1% of our request. Other states got 30% - 100% of their requests. This is murder by politics as usual, no way around it.
So I don't think this is Trump-bashing. I think it's reasonable that this point should be made over and over and over until the federal government does step up. And Cuomo is doing exactly that every morning.
I have already seen threads that imply that new hospital ships should have been built starting in January 2017. It can take as long as ten years to build a ship, depending on its mission. The USNS Mercy and USNS Comfort are very advanced in their age. So when do new hospital ships get contracted, AND, ready for service? And, even more to the point, does every state with a seacoast (15) or access to the sea via a river (ca 20), get an individual hospital ship? And, will any Congress, Democrat or Republican, agree to fund such a construction program as well as the necessary annual operating and manning budgets? I think not, it is generally not a "pork barrel" project since it bears no immediate fruit nor does it bode well if the next plague is 25 years out.