Agency Trump Picked To Handle Pandemic Spent ZERO Dollars Fighting Pandemic

Following the passage of the first stimulus package during the Trump administration, Trump gave the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation the job of doling out loans through the Pentagon's funds. A new watchdog report out this week shows that the agency ended up sending out ZERO DOLLARS. This is emblematic of the absolute incompetence that we witnessed when Trump was in charge of the pandemic. Ring of Fire's Farron Cousins explains what happened.

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*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.

The government agency that was tasked by Donald Trump in the early days of the pandemic, in fact, right after the Cares Act passed, Donald Trump gave this agency authority to dole out $100 million in loans to companies that were making medical supplies to keep the medical supply chain going. And they were going to use a hundred million dollars from the Pentagon. You know, we didn't have all the money allocated yet. So he said, okay, take the money from the Pentagon. I am trusting you, the group was the US international development finance corporation, the DFC, and according to a recent government audit this group that was supposed to give out a hundred million dollars in loans to keep the medical supply chain going, has given out a grand total of $0. Not one loan. Not one penny came out of this agency to help keep the medical supply chain going.

And we all know what happened. We had shortages of masks, shortages of gloves, shortages of ventilators, shortages of near every piece of medical equipment that we needed to help save lives during the early days of the pandemic. And don't think that they didn't have, you know, people wanting these loans, 178 applications were filed with the DFC. So 178 companies came up and said, yes, we need this money so we can keep doing this and we can do it over time. And the DFC just said, nah. And when they were asked by the government accountability office, why haven't you paid anything out? You've got 178 applications here. Where's the money? Their response was, that's just taken a little longer to process these things than we thought it would.

It's, it's, we're, we're, we're coming up on the two year anniversary of the first COVID cases around the world. You know, only about three months away from the first COVID cases confirmed here in the United States. And you mean to tell me, you still haven't been able to process this crap? Now I have actually never heard of this government agency, the DFC, um, I don't know that many people have. So it blows my mind that Donald Trump would pick this group to be the ones to dole out money to these medical companies. That kind of seems like something, hey, you know what, the FDA could have done it. I mean, they, they work with these companies all the time. Hell, a lot of their people come from these industries. They could've had the medical supply chain going.

Sure. There probably would have been some issues with that. Maybe companies getting a little bit more money than they deserved. But sometimes in an emergency situation, you have to let things like that go. So why didn't the FDA do it? Hell, why didn't OSHA do it? Why didn't the CDC do it? You could have even had the EPA do it. Instead, you had, you, you pick this obscure government agency that most don't even know exists because that's how incompetent and stupid Donald Trump was. Failure after failure after failure in the early days of this pandemic and of course throughout his entire presidency during the pandemic. But these missteps in the early days are what set us so far back from the rest of the world and the one person to blame for that is Donald Trump.