U.S. Customs and Border Protection put a hold on the PPE shipment, saying it wanted to conduct a quality control inspection. The shipment was transferred to the Food and Drug Administration, which carried out the inspection and placed its own hold on April 21. “The product is still on hold to this day,” the businessman said. “One of the press secretaries from the governor’s office called me on April 25 and said, ‘I found out why they’re not releasing it. They’re trying to [find] a reason to fail it so that they can keep it.’
“I’m on a phone call with [FEMA]. I said, ‘Guys, I just heard I may have failed the [quality control] test,’” the businessman recalled. “And you know what FEMA said? ‘That’s okay, we want the product anyway.’” (The businessman told me he has since launched an internal investigation to determine whether his shipment did indeed fail the test. The investigation is ongoing.)
“I thought to myself, You rat bastards.” FEMA, he said, is like a “bully at the lunchroom. If his mom’s not going to make him a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich, he just goes to the kid that has a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich and takes it from him.
“They are not trying to puppet-master me,” he said. “They’re trying to squash me…What am I supposed to do? Close my doors because FEMA said they are going to take everything I have? How the hell do they think I feel when nursing homes call me needing earloop masks? How do you feel as a human being? I have a huge warehouse with product that can protect people, and I can’t comprehend how I can’t give it to people. People are dying of thirst, and I’m here with a cooler full of water watching people die.”
Though the businessman’s case is extreme, a Seattle-based customs lawyer said that stories of the federal government seizing PPE will likely see ramifications down the line. “We end up telling clients that it could be the case that FEMA is…acting on thin or no legal authority,” the lawyer said. “We may be witnessing actions that are far beyond their authority in real time.” But “the legal resolution of these seizures will take time.… I cannot personally discount that there is a gray area—that six months, a year from now we start finding out about” unlawful seizures.
Dr. Purvi Parikh, an immunologist in New York City, said she attempted to procure PPE for a local hospital but was told by a colleague who arranged the shipment with her that the supplies had been given to FEMA. “The irony is I am trying to buy it for hospital colleagues,” she said. “I would like to think [that FEMA took it] to add to the national stockpile to distribute to hospitals in need. But I am hearing that PPE is still lacking in some places.”
William Touhey, a fire chief in Milford, Massachusetts, told a similar story. He said in early March, his station put in an order with a West Coast distributor, a friend of a friend, for 30,000 waterproof gowns to protect nurses at a local hospital. When the connection called to check on the order, “he said, ‘You’re not going to get that. FEMA took it.’ We learned that FEMA was in China and took it directly from the factory [there]. FEMA was buying up everything they could get their hands on. It seems to be a very common theme.”
One of the reasons FEMA has opted to seize smaller shipments rather than put in its own orders, the businessman suspected, has to do with speed. Local departments and privately owned companies are much nimbler, he hypothesized, able to interact with foreign corporations in ways the federal government can’t. “A federal government agency that wants to pay you in 14 days and wants to wait three days to make a decision, that’s why they don’t have product,” he said. “You have to be able to front the money.”
Meanwhile, others are going out of their way to avoid the businessman’s fate. A New York garment manufacturer with factories in China and Vietnam said he considered shipping PPE from China, though ultimately decided against it. “Vietnam is where to get the PPE now. I ordered 1,000 masks—three big boxes,” he said. “There’s plenty of product out there but not the ability to get it to the right people…. I wanted to give [the masks] to people who need them.”
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