-It's called Project Airbridge.
-Our airbridge continues to work.
-We built an airbridge with Asia.
-Almost from the beginning, the administration has talked
about Project Airbridge in, really,
soaring terms as a kind of war-time effort
hearkening back to the Berlin airlift
or the Manhattan Project or even the moon landing
and has given the administration kind of a rhetorical bridge
as much as a logistical one.
-The team doing that is an incredible team
of military people and young geniuses.
-Literally bringing in medical equipment
from around the country and around the world
and deploying it to critical areas.
-The president, the vice president,
and others were often giving misleading statements
about what was actually being delivered
through Project Airbridge.
In late March and around early April,
at this peak moment of the pandemic crisis,
the administration comes out
with this thing called Project Airbridge.
-FEMA is working with these companies
to launch Project Airbridge to expedite the movement
of critical supplies from other countries to the United States.
-The idea was to take supplies that are in Asia mostly
and expedite their delivery to the United States
by sending cargo flights to pick them up
and bring them to the United States much faster
than they would arrive if they were shipped by sea.
These materials would arrive in the United States.
They would be distributed by the private companies
to their existing customers.
FEMA gets to tell the private companies
where to distribute 50% of those supplies based on CDC hotspots.
We found it's impossible to find out where, in fact,
and confirm where, in fact, these materials arrive.
We called 10 of the hardest-hit counties
and asked them if they had received these supplies,
and in almost every case, they said they were unaware of that.
-They call this the airbridge, where they're bringing stuff
back from China to the United States,
and then they're delivering it to private companies
in the United States, not to the states,
and they're letting all of us bid against each other
for those goods that are owned by the private companies.
-Every day, new plane loads are landing in cities,
such as New York, Miami, Chicago, Los Angeles.
Additional flights have been scheduled,
and we're adding more and more,
and they're actually coming in ahead of schedule.
-The unmistakable impression that viewers
would have come away with was that Project Airbridge
was delivering vast quantities of much needed
PPE every day to the United States.
Administration officials, including the vice president,
were either misleading the public
with the statistics they were releasing
or they were overstating the amount of supplies
being delivered through Project Airbridge.
-The average daily delivery through the commercial network
through our airbridge
is 22 million facial masks coming into the marketplace.
-These flights have expedited nearly 1 billion pieces of PPE.
-Over more than 100 taxpayer-funded
Project Airbridge flights, it turns out the administration
has only brought in about 800,000 N95 masks,
and the government procured nearly 78 million N95
masks through conventional channels.
And what we also found was that 90% of the supplies
that Project Airbridge delivered have turned out
to be disposable gloves.
-And we created a control-tower approach
with the private company distributors in order
to make sure that we can be as efficient as possible,
and it's been quite successful.
-Well, Project Airbridge delivered important quantities
of certain items of PPE.
That part of it is not to be dismissed.
It also contributed to the overall impression of chaos
and a kind of free-for-all marketplace for these items.
Both state officials and federal officials
felt like they were either duplicating efforts
or were out of sync.
-States say they're bidding like they're on eBay,
because the supplies are going to the private sector,
and then they have to go there to get the supplies.
-That's normally how thing work, right?
So, I'm not here to disrupt a supply chain.
-This has added up to about $100 million
in taxpayer-funded transportation flights
for these items that the companies are then able
to distribute as part of their normal contracts.
By bringing in the private sector
and by having the private sector responsible
for so much of this distribution chain,
a lot of what is being distributed
through Project Airbridge
became proprietary in the language of these companies
and has made it extremely difficult to actually determine
if it has been a success or if it has been the benefit
that administration officials claim it has.