President Donald Trump’s ousted vaccine chief turned whistleblower will go public with his claims on Thursday in an unusually friendly setting — a hearing chaired by a close congressional ally whose district benefited from his decisions. Rick Bright, who was abruptly removed as director of the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority last month, will air his complaints about the Trump administration's pandemic response in front of a House subcommittee overseen by Rep. Anna Eshoo, a Democrat who represents a Northern California district home to a company that received more than $110 million in awards from BARDA while Bright led the office. Other companies with offices in Eshoo’s district benefited from more than $100 million in awards from BARDA in the decade prior to Bright's leadership. Eshoo, who helped craft the 2006 legislation to create BARDA and has since worked to bolster its authorities, also has been a longtime booster of Bright, including for his work...

The Trump administration has begun the formal process of planning for a potential transition of power if presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden wins. The administration sent over a report outlining its transition activities to two congressional committees on Wednesday night, announcing it has created a transition planning group -- the White House Transition Coordinating Council, which will advise executive departments and agencies on preparation for a potential transition -- and detailing other aspects of a handoff between administrations. A second panel, the Agency Transition Directors Council, primarily coordinates the transition within agencies. The Office of Management and Budget recently ordered all agency heads to pick career officials to participate in the latter group, which is due to meet on May 27. The law requires both groups to be established six months ahead of a presidential election, according to the Presidential Transitions Improvements Act of 2015. One of the o...

OAKLAND — Federal regulators said Wednesday they rejected certification earlier this month of the N95 masks that California had ordered from a Chinese firm in a massive $990 million purchase, a starker characterization of what transpired than Gov. Gavin Newsom gave last week. The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health did not detail its reasons for denying the company BYD, saying an on-site assessment of the company’s N95-model respirators deemed the equipment “not acceptable” on May 4. BYD can tweak its design and again seek approval under an expedited review process, federal regulators said. "The review of the documentation provided to NIOSH for the design, manufacturing and quality inspection of the device was concerning," the agency said in a statement. A week ago, Newsom conceded that the deal was running into problems, saying it had been "delayed" by a snag in federal approval. A May 6 contract amendment subsequently released by California ...

New Jersey could be facing a shortfall of more than $10 billion through the end of the next fiscal year because of the economic fallout from the coronavirus pandemic, according to new preliminary projections from the state Treasury department. “Based on a wide variety of economic assumptions, the State of New Jersey may be looking at a combined $10.104 billion revenue shortfall over the remaining months of Fiscal Year 2020 through the end of Fiscal Year 2021,” Treasurer Elizabeth Maher Muoio said in a statement late Wednesday. “While there are many moving parts, what is clear is that this decline would be worse than the Great Recession.” New Jersey, like many other states, is anticipating a severe budget crunch in the months ahead as businesses have temporarily shuttered and economic activity has slowed during the pandemic. New Jersey is the only state to push back its budget deadline. Traditionally, the budget must be enacted by June 30, but the new deadline is Sept. 30. The proje...

After Republicans and Democrats spent 90 minutes whipsawing between alternate realities, the top lawmakers on the House Select Committee on the Coronavirus Crisis paused for a fleeting display of humanity toward each other. "If the distance between me and you on any issue were five steps, I'd be happy to take three of them," House Majority Whip James Clyburn said to his GOP counterpart, Republican Whip Steve Scalise, as the panel's first meeting came to a close Wednesday. "I'd be happy to take the other two," Scalise replied. In fact, the parties started the day miles apart and ended it even further away. The first meeting of the new panel tasked with probing the government's coronavirus response won't be remembered for unearthing groundbreaking new policy information — and might not be remembered at all. But it was a visual distillation of the increasing dysfunction that has gripped Congress amid the coronavirus response and threatens to und...

For his critics, Anthony Fauci cemented his status as the Rasputin of public health with his Senate testimony this week. The director of the National Institutes for Health gently, but unmistakably, struck a different tone than President Donald Trump, earning rebukes from talk show hosts and Fox News anchors, as well as fueling the outrage of the #FireFauci claque on Twitter. Although Fauci’s every utterance is now examined with the same care as pronouncements of the pope, his words weren’t exactly earth-shattering. He said that if there are careless reopenings in the wrong conditions, “we will start to see little spikes that might turn into outbreaks.” Does anyone doubt that’s a possibility? Or that, per Fauci, new uncontrolled outbreaks will not only lead “to some suffering and death that could be avoided but could even set you back on the road to trying to get economic recovery”? No serious person would argue there are no hazards to opening back up or that it should be done heedl...