Tag: contracts

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Congressional investigation launched into Emergent BioSolutions’ federal vaccine contracts

Congressional investigation launched into Emergent BioSolutions' federal vaccine contracts

Top House Democrats have launched an investigation into whether Emergent Biosolutions, which recently botched 15 million doses of Covid-19 vaccine, won the federal contract for inclusion because of its cozy relationship with a former top Trump government official.

New York Rep. Carolyn B. Maloney, Chair of the House Committee on Oversight and Reform, and James E. Clyburn of South Carolina, Chair of the Select Subcommittee on Coronavirus Crisis, sent a joint letter to Emergent Solutions CEO Robert G. Kramer and board chairman Fuad El-Hibri demand that they testify before the coronavirus subcommittee.

“In particular, we are investigating reports that Emergent has won multi-million dollar contracts to manufacture coronavirus vaccines, despite a long, documented history of inadequately trained personnel and quality control issues,” the legislature wrote.

The committees deal specifically with the role that Dr. Robert Kadlec, former Emergent Advisor and Trump’s Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response, has played in helping the company get the job done. They asked the company to hand over a number of documents, including all federal contracts since 2015, all communications with Kadlec, as well as information on audits and inspections of its facilities, drug pricing and executive compensation.

“Emergent received $ 628 million in June 2020 to set up the primary US vaccine manufacturing facility developed by Johnson & Johnson and AstraZeneca,” lawmakers wrote in a letter sent to Kramer and El-Hibri on Monday . Kadlec “appears to have pushed for this award, although there are indications that Emergent was unable to reliably perform the contract.”

According to the letter, an FDA inspection of the Baltimore plant in April 2020 revealed that Emergent did not have the personnel to manufacture a coronavirus vaccine. Another inspection in June revealed that Emergent’s plan to manufacture much-needed coronavirus vaccines was inadequate due to poorly trained staff and quality control issues.

Despite falling short on federal inspections, the Trump administration paid the company $ 628 million in June to manufacture coronavirus vaccines.

Reports later surfaced indicating quality control issues at Emergent’s Baltimore facility.

“During the manufacturing process, your company contaminated millions of doses of Johnson & Johnson’s one-shot coronavirus vaccine with ingredients from the AstraZeneca vaccine,” the legislature wrote.

Emergent was forced to destroy up to 15 million tainted doses of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, and an additional 62 million doses remained pending until it was found not to have been mistaken by the York Times.

Emergent’s Baltimore facility has not been approved by the Food and Drug Administration, so none of the cans produced at the site were ever distributed or made it into the arms of the Americans.

“We are concerned about the cost to taxpayers and the potential impact on our country’s vaccination efforts from failed attempts by Emergent to manufacture these vaccines,” the legislature wrote.

Lawmakers also said they are considering Emergent’s role as the sole anthrax vaccine supplier on the Strategic National Stockpile.

“Emergent has increased the government purchase price for the anthrax vaccine by 800% since the drug was purchased in 1998. As a result, nearly half of the SNS budget has been spent on purchasing Emergent’s anthrax vaccine over the past decade,” so the representative wrote.

According to the letter, after Kadlec was confirmed in the Trump administration, Emergent received millions of dollars in federal contracts from his agency, including inventory contracts, “which were put out to tender”.

Emergent encouraged oversight of the inventory to be transferred from the Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention to the Deputy Secretary’s Office for Preparedness and Response under Kadlec’s control according to the letter.

Until 2015, Kadlec Emergent advised through his company RPK Consulting. Kadlec was confirmed as the head of the Office of the Ministry of Health and Human Services in 2017.

Kramer and El-Hibri were asked to testify before the subcommittee on May 19 at 10:30 am ET.

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Business

Unions at The Ringer and Gimlet Media announce their first contracts.

Hong Kong Website Doxxing Police Gets Blocked, Raising Censorship Fears

Unions representing employees of two well-known podcasting companies owned by Spotify, the audio streaming giant, announced on Wednesday that they had ratified their first employment contracts.

The larger of the two unions, with 65 employees, is at The Ringer, a sports and pop culture website with a podcasting network. The second union of the podcast production company Gimlet Media employs almost 50 people. The two groups were among the first in the podcasting industry to unionise, and both are represented by the Writers Guild of America, East.

Lowell Peterson, the guild’s executive director, said the contracts showed that the companies’ writers, producers and editors “add tremendous value to the major platforms they create content for.”

The contracts provide for a minimum base salary of $ 57,000 for union members at The Ringer and $ 73,000 at Gimlet Media, an annual pay increase of at least 2 percent, and severance pay of at least 11 weeks.

The agreements contain provisions that restrict the use of contractors and allow workers to obtain titles appropriate to their seniority.

The two companies will set up diversity committees made up of managers and union members and require that at least half of the candidates seriously considered for union positions open to outsiders come from under-represented groups such as ethnic minorities or people with disabilities come.

Ringer and Gimlet Media have dealt with internal race-related conflicts over the past year. At The Ringer, staff complained about the shortage of black writers and editors after company founder Bill Simmons hosted a podcast in which a colleague personally discussed the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder and praised Mr. Simmons’ commitment to diversity.

At Gimlet, the company recently canceled the last two episodes of a four-part series on racial inequality in food magazine Bon Appétit after employees complained that Gimlet himself suffered from similar problems.

Workers at both companies were unionized in 2019 and contract negotiations were at times controversial. Management refused to establish a top union priority – labor rights created by writers and podcasters that the companies will keep – but the unions ratified the treaties unanimously, according to the Writers’ Guild.

“We started this process with the aim of improving working conditions and remuneration in the company, especially for our worst-paid members,” the Ringer Union said in a statement. “We are very pleased to have achieved this goal with this contract.”

Spotify did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

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Business

Biden Strikes to Finish Justice Contracts with Personal Prisons

Biden Moves to End Justice Contracts with Private Prisons

WASHINGTON – President Biden signed an executive order on Tuesday to terminate the Department of Justice’s contracts with private prisons and step up government enforcement of a law to combat discrimination in the housing market. This is part of the new government’s continued focus on racial justice.

Mr Biden also signed orders making it a federal government policy to “condemn and denounce” discrimination and relations between Americans from Asia and the Pacific, who have been harassed from China to the US since the coronavirus pandemic spread US to strengthen government and Indian tribes.

The steps are incremental parts of Mr Biden’s broader pursuit of racial justice – an initiative that is expected to be a centerpiece of his administration, and that follows an ordinance last week instructing federal agencies to review policies to combat systemic racism. Government efforts are led by Susan E. Rice, who heads the Home Affairs Council.

“I don’t promise we can end it tomorrow, but I promise you we will keep making progress to eradicate systemic racism,” Biden said before signing the orders. He added that “every branch of the White House and federal government will be part of this effort”.

The orders are an escalating rejection of President Donald J. Trump’s policies and attitudes toward racial relations. In separate executive orders, Mr Biden last week lifted a Trump administration’s ban on diversity training in federal agencies and disbanded a Trump-created historical commission that issued a report aimed at promoting the nation’s founders who were slave-owners to give a more positive effect.

On a conference call with reporters, a senior White House official described the Trump administration’s “hideous” Muslim ban, saying that certain minority groups had been treated with “a profound level of disrespect for political leaders and the White House.”

During a press conference on Tuesday, White House press secretary Jen Psaki accused the Trump administration of exacerbating racial inequalities over health. “The previous administration’s actions to destroy the Affordable Care Act in every way did not help any American, and it certainly did not help the color communities,” she said.

During the same briefing, Ms. Rice made it clear that the administration was moving in a new direction, highlighting these differences rather than ignoring them – and that appointing a woman of color to oversee the initiative was part of that approach.

“Americans of color are infected and are more likely to die from Covid,” she said, noting that “40 percent of black-owned businesses were forced too close forever during the Covid crisis.”

A descendant of immigrants from Jamaica, Ms. Rice called herself the living embodiment of the American dream and stated that “investing in equity is good for economic growth” and “creates jobs for all Americans”.

The new Washington

Updated

Jan. 26, 2021, 8:40 p.m. ET

One of the orders signed on Tuesday called on the Justice Department not to renew contracts with private prisons and reverted to policies first adopted in the Obama administration when Mr Biden was Vice President and which Mr Trump reversed.

The order does not end all government contracts with private prisons – administrative officials confirmed it would not apply to other agencies such as Immigration and Customs Enforcement that are contracting private companies to detain thousands of undocumented immigrants.

“There is broad consensus that our current system of mass detention places significant costs and hardships on our society and our communities and does not make us safer,” the regulation says. “To reduce incarceration rates, we need to reduce for-profit incarceration incentives by phasing out the federal government’s dependence on privately operated prisons.”

The Housing Ordinance instructs the Department of Housing and Urban Development to tighten the enforcement of the Fair Housing Act of 1968, which aims to discriminate against home purchases. This includes asking the department to review the actions taken under Mr Trump that have sought to weaken some of that enforcement. Last year, as part of Trump’s attempted appeals to suburban white voters, the department rolled back an Obama-era program aimed at combating segregation in housing.

“This represents a clear change of direction that will get us back on track to comply with fair housing law,” said Julián Castro, who served as Secretary of Housing and Urban Development under President Barack Obama. “It’s a very strong signal that it’s a new day when it comes to fair living and that HUD will be aggressive again. In some ways, this is the easy part, but it’s a powerful first step. “

Mr Castro said the housing division is still lagging behind in the number of staff needed to enforce fair housing law and that nonprofit groups across the country dealing with fair housing issues have federal funding and others Resources should be preserved. Given the fact that the action took place on the sixth day of the new administration, this is a “clear rejection of Trump’s scare tactics” about low-income apartments invading white suburbs.

Mr. Biden’s jail warrant was lauded by the American Federation of Government Employees Prison Officials Council, which represents 30,000 federal prison workers across the country, and groups working to reduce the mass incarceration of blacks and other Americans.

“Eliminating the use of for-profit prisons is only a first step,” said Holly Harris, executive director of Justice Action Network, a non-partisan criminal justice organization – but a move with implications beyond the low percentage of federal prisoners held in private prisons. “Everyone misses the fact that they are a major obstacle to reform because they give millions to elected officials who write our criminal law.”

Ms. Harris, who said she was a Republican, added that she “showed a little mercy to the Democratic government and welcomed this first step.”

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Politics

Biden to order DOJ to finish non-public jail contracts as a part of racial fairness push

Biden to order DOJ to end private prison contracts as part of racial equity push

President Joe Biden signs an executive order for transgender people for military service in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, USA on January 25, 2021 when he meets with new Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin.

Kevin Lemarque | Reuters

President Joe Biden will order his Justice Department on Tuesday not to renew his private prison contracts, one of several new planks on Biden’s broader agenda for racial justice.

Biden is ready to sign four more executive measures after submitting his press schedule to the White House at 2:00 p.m. CET according to his press schedule. Vice President Kamala Harris will also attend the event.

Actions are aimed at tackling discriminatory housing practices, reforming the prison system, respecting the sovereignty of tribal governments, and combating xenophobia against Asian Americans, especially in the face of the Covid pandemic.

The actions are just the latest in a comprehensive flex of the presidential powers in the first week. According to a preview from senior administrators, Biden will sign on Tuesday afternoon:

  • An executive order directing Biden’s attorney general not to renew DOJ contracts with privately operated penal institutions
  • A presidential memorandum directing the Department of Housing and Urban Development to investigate the impact of the Trump administration’s regulatory actions that “undermine fair housing policies and laws.” Based on this analysis, the memo also instructs the HUD to take steps to fully implement the requirements of the Fair Housing Act.
  • An executive order urging federal agencies to deal with tribal governments regularly and meaningfully
  • And an executive memorandum directing the Department of Health and Human Services and the Covid Health Equity Task Force to publish best practices in their Covid response efforts to promote “cultural literacy” and sensitivity towards Asian Americans and islanders in the Pacific to consider. The memo also instructs the DOJ to work with these communities to prevent hate crimes and harassment against them.

The President’s speech and signatures will be preceded by a press conference at 12:30 p.m., at which domestic affairs adviser Susan Rice is due to appear alongside the White House press secretary Jen Psaki.

“America never kept its basic promise of equality for all, but we never stopped trying,” Biden said Tuesday morning in a tweet from the president’s official Twitter account.

“Today I will take action to promote racial justice and bring us closer to the more perfect union we have always been looking for.”

The White House said in a separate tweet that the new measures will “promote racial justice and support communities of color and other underserved communities.”

Biden put questions of racial justice at the center of his winning campaign against former President Donald Trump. Shortly after he took office, Biden signed an executive order setting his government’s focus on social justice and repealing some of his predecessor’s policies.

In particular, the January 20 action overturned Trump’s September order to restrict federal entrepreneurs’ ability to deliver training on diversity and inclusion in the workplace.

Biden also ended the Trump administration’s “1776 Commission” which, in the final days of Trump’s tenure, produced a report that was extremely critical of progressive ideologies.

Biden’s command charged the Rice-headed Home Affairs Council with coordinating “efforts to embed principles, strategies, and approaches of justice throughout the federal government.”

“This includes efforts to remove and provide equal access to systemic barriers to opportunity and benefit, identify communities that have been underserved by the federal government, and develop strategies to advance equity for those communities,” it said in this regulation.

Biden is expected to return to the state dining room at 4:45 p.m. to speak about his government’s efforts to contain the Covid pandemic.

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Politics

Pete Buttigieg donors scored contracts from South Bend when he was mayor

Pete Buttigieg donors scored contracts from South Bend when he was mayor

Former South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg, U.S. President-elect Joe Biden’s candidate for Secretary of Transportation, reacts to his nomination as Biden looks on during a press conference on December 16, 2020 at Biden’s interim headquarters in Wilmington, Delaware, USA .

Kevin Lemarque | Reuters

Pete Buttigieg, Joe Biden’s election as Secretary of Transportation and former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, received presidential campaign donations from executives of companies that had public works contracts with the city while he was running it.

A CNBC review of dozens of the city’s infrastructure contracts during his second term as mayor from 2016-2020 shows that under Buttigieg, some of the city’s spending went to contractors who would later become donors to his presidential campaign, which he launched in 2019.

If approved by the US Senate, Buttigieg, as head of the Department of Transportation, would be responsible for driving the incoming administration’s infrastructure proposals forward.

Buttigieg is 38 years old and is considered a rising star in the National Democratic Party. His role as transport secretary could strengthen him if he aspires to a higher office again.

Several of the contractors produced new roads, bridges and buildings for the city. South Bend’s latest budget is over $ 350 million. The Department of Transportation will start the new year with a budget of over $ 80 billion. Buttigieg proposed a $ 1 trillion infrastructure plan when he ran for president.

Data from the bipartisan Center for Responsive Politics shows Buttigieg raised nearly $ 100 million during his presidential campaign. About $ 2 million came from real estate donors.

A report from the Center for Public Integrity and progressive media company The Young Turks shows that Buttigieg received similar contributions from city entrepreneurs when he first ran for mayor in 2011. In this case, potential contractors gave something to his political organization, and they then received funding agreements from the city after submitting competitive bids. These offers were then approved by the Public Works Authority.

The Buttigieg team answers

After CNBC finalized most of the contracts and resulting contributions to the Biden transition team, a Buttigieg spokesperson sent CNBC a detailed response. The representative declined to be included in this story.

The spokesman said Buttigieg was not involved in the projects while noting that the companies did business with the city before Buttigieg became mayor. The spokesman also said leaders have run other Democratic presidential campaigns in the past, including Bidens, Hillary Clintons and Barack Obamas. Some also gave up to Republicans.

“Pete avoided delving into who got those contracts for that very reason. And I’d also like to point out that on Pete’s first day as mayor, he put in place a code of ethics and signed a responsible bidder regulation in 2018 to ensure that taxpayers’ dollars are preserved efficiently spent by responsible contractors, “said the Buttigieg spokesman.

The spokesman noted that Buttigieg signed an executive order in 2012 that stipulated that any government employee, including himself, would not knowingly solicit or receive gifts or favors from any person who has a business relationship or seeks business from a city authority.

“You link to contracts that have been approved by the Board of Public Works, which meets in public, does its business in public and approves those contracts through an open and transparent procurement process that goes through a bidding process, and as I said earlier – has little involvement from the mayor, “said the representative.

CNBC provided the City of South Bend with details of most of the contracts approved by the Board of Public Works and the executives who later contributed to Buttigieg’s presidential campaign. A spokesman defended the company.

“Each of these firms is highly regarded and has a local reputation for providing quality services to the city and residents of South Bend,” Mayor’s press secretary Caleb Bauer told CNBC. “Each of these contracts also went through a professional procurement process, which is public and transparent, before being approved by the public works agency, which is governed by state law.”

Still, some Democrats expect Republicans to make a big deal out of the contributions Buttigieg has received from contractors.

“He’s been charged with conflicts of interest, and if the Republicans hold the Senate, he’s going to go through a very, very tough ratification process,” said veteran Democratic strategist Hank Sheinkopf.

Companies and contracts

In 2017, construction company Walsh & Kelly signed a $ 600,000 contract with South Bend for a future Courtyard Marriott hotel. Two years later, the company received contracts valued at just over $ 2.4 million from South Bend. The hotel opened in 2018.

Walsh & Kelly President Kevin Kelly contributed $ 2,700 to Buttigieg’s presidential campaign, according to CRP data. This is almost the maximum contribution a person can legally make to a campaign.

Walsh & Kelly did not return comments-seeking calls.

Arne Sorenson, CEO of Marriott, gave Buttigieg’s campaign the maximum amount of $ 2,800, records show.

A Marriott spokeswoman defended Sorenson’s donation to Buttigieg’s political organization.

“Arne Sorenson personally supported Pete Buttigieg’s presidential campaign because his wife and children were inspired by his campaign,” Elynsey Price, a spokesman for the hotel chain, told CNBC. “Whatever was going on near or in relation to the South Bend hotels would have been the responsibility of our franchisees or owners, not Marriott.”

South Bend real estate development firm JSK Hospitality closed one of its largest deals in 2018 when a subsidiary of the company bought the former College Football Hall of Fame building in town for over $ 525,000, according to the South Bend Tribune. The CEO, AJ Patel, gave $ 1,000 to the Buttigieg campaign. The Courtyard Marriott is part of the company’s hotel portfolio.

CNBC was unable to leave a message on JSK Hospitality’s general voicemail box on Tuesday because the voicemail was full. The same was true of Patel’s line. Instead, CNBC left a message for the company’s CFO, who didn’t respond to a request for comment.

In 2017, the city reached an agreement with Epoch Architecture to build a new fire station in South Bend. The company agreed to make payments from the city of over $ 280,000 for the project. The director of the engineering and architecture firm, Kyle Copelin, later gave $ 500 to the Buttigieg campaign, records show.

Copelin did not respond to a request for comment.

In 2017, the city signed at least three contracts with Jones Petrie Rafinski, an architecture and engineering firm with offices in South Bend. The company had over $ 200,000 worth of business with the city that year. Two years later, the company’s vice president David Rafinski donated $ 500 to Buttigieg’s presidential campaign. His company also had other contracts with South Bend in 2019.

Rafinski told CNBC that he has no interaction with Buttigieg’s executive team while his company works for South Bend.

“We have been a customer of South Bend since Pete was in high school,” said Rafinski. “The work we do is done through the Board of Public Works. We had no interaction with Pete at all with our work. It was all through the Board of Public Works.” Rafinski said he supported Buttigieg’s presidential campaign because he believed the former mayor’s “compassion” was needed in national politics.

South Bend also signed a consultancy agreement with the Canadian company Stantec in 2017. The order was valued at over $ 105,000. The agreement with the design and engineering firm appeared to go through the nearby Chicago offices. Later, Michael Toolis, who is a Stantec vice president according to LinkedIn, gave $ 2,000 to Buttigieg’s presidential campaign. Toolis was once employed by VOA Associates, a Midwestern design firm that previously worked at the University of Notre Dame. VOA was taken over by Stantec in 2016.

“The company does not allow political contributions to candidates on its behalf,” Stantec spokeswoman Laura Leopold replied in a one-line email to questions from CNBC.

American Structurepoint, an engineering firm headquartered in Indianapolis, won at least seven $ 300,000 contracts in 2018 for consulting and other services for South Bend. Greg Henneke, the senior executive vice president, gave Buttigieg’s presidential campaign $ 2,700 a year later.

Both Stantec and American Structurepoint had contracts with the city in 2019.

An American Structurepoint spokeswoman did not respond to a request for comment.