HHS Secretary Alex Azar complains of tarnished legacy in resignation letter to Trump
Source: CNN
(CNN) President Donald Trump's "actions and rhetoric" have tarnished the administration's legacy, Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar said in a resignation letter submitted this week. Azar submitted the standard resignation letter for a Cabinet secretary to offer an outgoing president, dated January 12 and obtained by CNN Friday.
In the letter, addressed to Trump, Azar laid out what he considered to be the best accomplishments of HHS over the past four years. "Unfortunately, the actions and rhetoric following the election, especially during this past week, threaten to tarnish these and other historic legacies of this Administration," Azar wrote in the letter.
"The attacks on the Capitol were an assault on our democracy and on the tradition of peaceful transitions of power that the United States of America first brought to the world," Azar wrote in the letter, first reported by The New York Times.
"I implore you to continue to condemn unequivocally any form of violence, to demand that no one attempt to disrupt the inaugural activities in Washington or elsewhere, and to continue to support unreservedly the peaceful and orderly transition of power on January 20, 2021." Azar said he plans to stay in his role until January 20, when President-elect Joe Biden's team takes over.
Read more: https://www.cnn.com/2021/01/15/politics/alex-azar-resigns/index.html
He was part of the pandemic problem.
= new reply since forum marked as read
to even do that. The ventilator production is another "success" but again, only because they were shamed into it and the industries given the tasks were cherry-picked for political reasons and produced an uneven outcome -
By Faiz Siddiqui
August 18, 2020 at 7:00 a.m. EDT
SAN FRANCISCO — Months into a $3 billion U.S. effort to manufacture tens of thousands of ventilators to stave off coronavirus deaths, the government stockpile is facing a glut. General Motors and Ford by early May began delivering the first ventilators they scrambled to manufacture, in part compelled by President Trump’s invocation of the federal Defense Production Act. General Electric, Philips and other manufacturers’ efforts have delivered more than 94,000 of them to the stockpile, and General Motors plans to soon hand over its business to a counterpart.
During the first weeks of the covid-19 crisis in March, health officials panicked over an anticipated shortage of ventilators, breathing machines that were essential to help keep patients alive. But during the months it took for companies to develop their supply chains, test prototypes and train workers to build them, the approach to treating covid-19 changed. Ford and GM are undertaking a warlike effort to produce ventilators. It may come too late. Now, unexpectedly, the vast majority of ventilators are going unused. The Department of Health and Human Services said it had handed out 15,057 ventilators by Friday, and there were 95,713 ventilators in the federal stockpile. Of those, 94,352 came from contracts signed since the beginning of the pandemic.
“In the fog of war against the virus, we were trying to do our best to protect the health and safety of the American people,” said Peter Navarro, White House trade adviser and Defense Production Act policy coordinator. “In this particular chess game, the best move was to make sure we had too many ventilators rather than too few.” Navarro said that excess ventilators will be used to help other countries fighting the novel coronavirus, either as revenue-generating exports or as donations.
The misalignment between the availability and need for ventilators shows that the medical understanding of and response to the coronavirus has moved faster than companies can adapt. And for Ford, which got the order to supply the largest quantity of ventilators to the federal stockpile, production and delivery were delayed, further throwing it out of sync with the pandemic needs. In April, doctors and other medical experts worried that the government’s orders of ventilators would be too little, too late to meet the initial peak in cases in the spring. But the curve of infections has stretched out for longer than initially projected — and the treatment evolved.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/08/18/ventilators-coronavirus-stockpile/
If the pandemic hadn't been dismissed as a "hoax" as far back as last January, and insisting it would "wash over" and be gone "by Easter", then the production might have started early enough to have offered the devices to the hardest hit areas to get through the first wave's April peak on the east coast, until they got a better handle on the best treatments to avoid the need for them. Even the mentality of something like this as "revenue-generating" underscores their complete tone deafness and disregard for health and science and instead think only of the $$$ that can be made.
served under 6 presidents and 8 Department heads (not including actings) and yes I'm going to call a spade a spade.
I have NEVER seen such an egregious appointee mess than under this current administration - even from Raygun, Poppy, or Shrub appointees.
Biden's picks can't come in soon enough. 
and under HHS. 
I'm just glad I retired 2 weeks after 45 was inaugurated!! 
I would be screaming even more than I've done not being in the office the past 4 years. 
(ETA - as soon as I hit my MRA, that paperwork was filed with my HR people to eventually be sent to OPM 
)
was also retired Army and we are emailing/texting every day. She's the same way but is real and down to earth.
$$$$$
I know a bunch who did the full 41 years, 11 months to get the 80% but I know I would have gone stark raving mad. And since I knew that a bunch of things that were being deducted from my salary (Philly city wage tax and PA state income tax, plus SS, since I was CSRS-offset, etc.) would no longer be taken out, that would bring my retirement net not far from the net that I had while still working, so it was worth it! No more stress about damn government shutdowns!
when he changed the Civil Service Act - and of course his first act after inauguration - firing those PATCO workers. It took them almost 20 years to finally replace most of them and restaff with full-time experienced controllers that weren't borrowed from the military. 
