FEMA says national stockpile of supplies en route to states

Several of the nation's governors on Sunday urged the federal government to provide more protective gear to the states and health care systems, prompting President Donald Trump to lash out at them on Twitter.

Gov. J.B. Pritzker of Illinois, a Democrat, appearing on CNN on Sunday morning, said the federal government has shipped or promised to ship some personal protective equipment. But he said the help represented "a fraction still of what we have requested. We need millions of masks and hundreds of thousands of gowns and gloves and the rest. And, unfortunately, we're getting still just a fraction of that."

Trump took to Twitter on Sunday afternoon to roast Pritzker, CNN and Comcast, which owns NBC and MSNBC. Trump wrote that Pritzker and "a very small group of certain other Governors, together with Fake News @CNN & Concast (MSDNC), shouldn’t be blaming the Federal Government for their own shortcomings. We are there to back you up should you fail, and always will be!"

Later Sunday, Trump said in his daily news briefing that more protective medical gear from the federal government would arrive in New York within the next 48 hours.

Trump said to date the federal government has provided New York with 186,000 masks, 84,000 face shields and 68,000 surgical masks. Trump said Sunday he has approved Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo’s request for the Federal Emergency Management Agency to set up 1,000 additional hospital beds in the state.

As states and health care workers issue urgent pleas for protective gear, the head of FEMA insisted Sunday that “millions of things” were being shipped to states from the national stockpile to fight the coronavirus, but he could not detail when exactly New York and other states could expect to receive the equipment.

"They're shipping today, they shipped yesterday, they'll ship tomorrow," FEMA Administrator Peter Gaynor told ABC “This Week” anchor Martha Raddatz.

Pressed by Raddatz on whether health care systems would become overwhelmed before states receive much needed masks, Gaynor said he couldn’t provide “details about what every single state or what every single city is doing.”

“I'm telling you that we are shipping from our national stockpile, we're shipping from vendors, we're shipping from donations. It is happening. The demand is great,” Gaynor said.

On CNN's "State of the Union," Gaynor said, "I can’t give you a rough number” after anchor Jake Tapper asked how many masks the federal government has acquired. "I can tell you that it's happening every day," said Gaynor.

Asked on NBC's "Meet the Press" whether there were enough ventilators and N95 masks in supply for the next six weeks, Gaynor said the equipment were "finite, limited resources."

"Will we ever have enough? I'm not sure, but our goal is to make sure that we aim these critical resources to the places that need them the most. And then, we'll triage as we go."

He added that many agencies within the federal government were helping with the response. "We're doing great things today," he told NBC anchor Chuck Todd.

On Thursday, Trump announced FEMA — the nation’s federal disaster response agency — would coordinate the federal response moving forward as state governors continued to flood the White House with calls for assistance.

Asked if Trump moved too slowly to involve the agency in the White House coronavirus task force, Gaynor told Raddatz: “I’m not going to look back on what should’ve been done, what wasn’t done. We can do that at a later time.”

Governors on Sunday continued to sound the alarm on supply shortages, calling on Trump to use his authority under the National Defense Act to order companies to manufacture protective equipment.

In a tweet, New York Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo said Sunday that he was "calling on the Federal Government to nationalize the medical supply chain. The Federal Government should immediately use the Defense Production Act to order companies to make gowns, masks and gloves. Currently, states are competing against other states for supplies."

Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, a Democrat, said on ABC's "This Week" that her state is "doing the best that we can. We’re going to continue to be aggressive and we’re continually monitoring what the next move we can make is. But we need the federal government to get us those test kits."

She said Michigan needs personal protective equipment, and "a clear directive and guidance from the federal government ... It would be nice to have a national strategy."

She blamed the federal government for failing to plan for the pandemic, but said she needed its help. "Had the federal government really started focusing when it became clear that the whole world was going to be confronting this, we would be in a stronger position right now. And that’s an issue that I’m not going to belabor because I’ve got to keep solving problems and I would like the federal government to be a partner."

Also Sunday, Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said on CBS' "Face the Nation" that the United States was "not necessarily" on its way to "becoming an Italy." Italy, the new epicenter of the virus, has had more than 4,800 residents die, the most in a single country, according to The Washington Post.

“We don’t know why they are suffering so terribly, but there’s a possibility and many of us believe that early on they did not shut out as well the input of infections that originated in China and came to different parts of the world."

“We will not be that way because we have from the beginning been able to put a bit of a clamper. We’re going to get hit. There’s no doubt about it, we see it in New York. New York is terribly suffering.”

He said that social distancing measures and travel restrictions will “go a long way to preventing us from becoming an Italy."

By Scott Eidler

scott.eidler@newsday.com,laura.figueroa@newsday.com@ScottEidler,

Scott Eidler is a deputy editor for the towns department at Newsday. Scott has worked at Newsday since 2012 and previously covered municipal government and education.