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Comment by qsymmachus | Hacker News Reader

> Insane that this is happening without federal coordination

Not surprising, because the feds are providing zero leadership right now. Just today, Trump told the governors on a conference call that they should "get their own ventilators". We should not expect competent and engaged leadership from this administration any time soon.

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That's quite the fake news you got there. Trump said governors should feel free to provision their own if they have a faster pipeline, rather than waiting for the fed's orders to arrive and then have to apply, etc.

But to claim the federal government has not bought equipment it plans to distribute is a lie .

To clarify, this is what the president stated about 30 minutes ago during the ongoing press conference, when asked about his previous statement. Before that we only had the unqualified phrase.

More reasonable stuff is coming out of Trump now. This is encouraging.

Amusingly, this morning, there was zero Trump content on the Fox News home page. All epidemic info was from more reliable sources. The story behind that must be interesting.

“Respirators, ventilators, all of the equipment — try getting it yourselves,” Mr. Trump told the governors during the conference call, a recording of which was shared with The New York Times. “We will be backing you, but try getting it yourselves. Point of sales, much better, much more direct if you can get it yourself.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/16/us/politics/trump-coronav...

Imagine if you had to go to your VP or CEO to get approval to buy a new laptop. How long would you have to wait? How much of their time would be sucked up with organizationally-irrelevant bs?

The US military has the principle of solving things at the lowest level possible. Not only does it prevent extra time and hops but it means the people closest to the problem are the ones solving it.

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