[oldalum]

There's plenty of blame to go around, large and small. How about the people in the government who let the contract lapse to maintain the ventilators in the national stockpile?

I think you might want to look into this one a bit more. The contract to maintain the national stockpile was let. One of the bidders protested. By law, at that point everything stops and the protest must be evaluated. You cannot legally put out another RFP for the same service/product until that protest is heard and decided. If the protest is deemed to have merit, a new solicitation and RFP must be issued. While this process is technically an administrative one, it amounts to a civil legal proceeding, and that process takes months. That is the government contracting process. The only way that somebody was allowed to start maintaining them was, as I understand it, the emergency declaration at the start of the epidemic.

Thanks, I should stop watching the TV news

[oldalum]

There's plenty of blame to go around, large and small. How about the people in the government who let the contract lapse to maintain the ventilators in the national stockpile?

I think you might want to look into this one a bit more. The contract to maintain the national stockpile was let. One of the bidders protested. By law, at that point everything stops and the protest must be evaluated. You cannot legally put out another RFP for the same service/product until that protest is heard and decided. If the protest is deemed to have merit, a new solicitation and RFP must be issued. While this process is technically an administrative one, it amounts to a civil legal proceeding, and that process takes months. That is the government contracting process. The only way that somebody was allowed to start maintaining them was, as I understand it, the emergency declaration at the start of the epidemic.

Thanks, I should stop watching the TV news