Jared Kushner, President Trump’s son-in-law and a senior adviser, has created his own team of government allies and private industry representatives to work alongside the administration’s official coronavirus task force, adding another layer of confusion and conflicting signals within the White House’s disjointed response to the crisis.
Kushner, who joined the administration’s coronavirus efforts last week, is primarily focused on attempting to set up drive-through testing sites with the help of technology and retail executives, as well as experts in health-care delivery.
The goal, officials familiar with the work said, is to have limited testing in a handful of cities running by Friday and to expand the project from there.
But Kushner’s team is causing confusion among many officials involved in the response, who say they are unsure who is in charge given Kushner’s dual role as senior adviser and Trump family member.
Some have privately dubbed his team a “shadow task force” whose requests they interpret as orders they must balance with regular response efforts.
Kushner’s early involvement with dealing with the virus was in advising Trump that the media’s coverage exaggerated the threat.
But when Pence’s chief of staff asked him to help merge the Pence and Trump communications operations because the two-person shop in the vice president’s office found itself overwhelmed and trying to keep up, Kushner, long critical of the White House communications shop, tried to supplement the vice president’s team with other aides.
One of them was Hope Hicks, the former White House communications director, who recently rejoined the administration as Kushner’s aide.
Some members of Kushner’s team are working out of offices on the seventh floor of Health and Human Services headquarters — one floor above the office of HHS secretary Alex Azar — while others are working out of an office in the West Wing of the White House, officials said.
They include representatives of companies such as UPS, FedEx and Flatiron Health, as well as Kushner allies inside the government such as Brad Smith, director of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation.
Two senior officials said some government officials have become increasingly confused as they have received emails from private industry employees on Kushner’s team and have been on conference calls with them, unsure what their exact role is in the government response. Several people involved in the response said the involvement of outside advisers — who are emailing large groups of government employees from private email addresses — also raises legitimate security concerns about whether these advisers are following proper government protocols.
“We don’t know who these people are,” one senior official said. “Who is this? We’re all getting these emails.”
Kushner defended his role in an interview, saying his team’s goal was to bring “an entrepreneurial approach” to the crisis.
“We’re getting things done in record speeds and are doing everything possible to avoid damage and mitigate the negative impacts,” Kushner said. “In America, some of our best resources are in our private sector. The federal government is not designed to solve all our problems; a lot of the muscle is in the private sector and there’s also a lot of smart people.”
This account of Kushner’s involvement in the administration’s coronavirus response effort is based on interviews with 10 senior administration officials and people familiar with the effort, most of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal dynamics and speak candidly.
Kushner operates from a nearly untouchable perch within the White House hierarchy, which has worried some officials.
Some aides say that regardless of the official organization chart, they know that Kushner can walk into the Oval Office when he wants or call the president late at night, allowing him a final private word after the routine meetings have ended.
Trump has grown frustrated with him at times — including over his widely criticized Oval Office address last week, which Kushner helped write — but he remains family and so far has outlasted and outmaneuvered internal rivals.
Kushner — who already has an overly large portfolio, which had become the subject of mockery by his critics — did not become involved in the virus response until last week, at the request of Pence’s chief of staff.
Kushner had previously counseled the president that the media and some in the administration were overreacting to the threat of the virus.
He helped write Trump’s widely panned prime-time Oval Office address last week that sent markets into a free fall, pushed Trump to ban travel from Europe and orchestrated a Rose Garden news conference last Friday where Trump announced a ramped-up testing effort that turned out to be in only the early stages of development.
Trump announced that Google was developing a website where Americans could provide their symptoms, find out whether they needed to be tested and then be directed to a testing site near their homes that retailers including Target, CVS and Walgreens would help set up.
But several of the companies quickly distanced themselves from the claims, and little has come of the efforts so far.
Kushner’s team is primarily focused on getting the testing project launched by the end of this week in “hot spot” areas with large outbreaks, such as Seattle, the San Francisco Bay area and New York City, officials said.
The team is also focused on procurement issues, particularly related to the nasal swabs needed to conduct the diagnostic tests, which officials have warned could face shortages as the number of tests expands.