A congressional task force President Donald Trump established to advise the White House on reopening the economy has met virtually just once in the roughly two weeks since it was created, Democratic U.S. Sen. Tammy Duckworth said in a television appearance.
Appearing on an episode of “The Daily Show with Trevor Noah” that aired Tuesday night, the junior U.S. senator from Illinois was asked why the public hasn’t heard more from the Opening Up America Again task force. Duckworth said the group met by phone and the president spent most of the time “boasting” about “how great the testing was going in this country.”
“Our task force has only met once, we had one phone call for an hour — 45 minutes of that hour was spent with President Trump boasting on how great the testing was going in this country, how we had conducted more testing than any other country and that other countries were calling us (and) asking us to give them tests,” said Duckworth, a frequent Trump critic.
Duckworth and U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin, another Illinois Democrat, were among 65 senators named to the working group, which includes a dozen Democrats and all Republican senators except Mitt Romney of Utah. Romney voted to convict Trump in the president’s impeachment trial.
Of 32 House members also named to the task force, there are 22 Republicans and 10 Democrats, including Illinois U.S. Rep. Rodney Davis, a Republican, the Tribune previously reported.
Duckworth disputes the president’s take on the nation’s testing efforts, saying that when asked how many tests the country would need to safely reopen the country, “the Trump administration had no answers.”
“This is a basic math problem. You need to know how many tests we need to have,” Duckworth said, adding: “You can do the basic math and figure out how many tests you need — and they don’t know.”
The president’s communications staff didn’t offer an immediate response to Duckworth’s criticism.
This week, the White House issued its blueprint to increase testing in the country to ensure states had enough COVID-19 tests available to sample roughly 2% of their populations each month — a figure already met by a majority of states. Areas that have been harder hit by the virus would be able to test at double that rate, or higher, the White House said.
As a task force member, Duckworth said she’s going to push to get testing ramped up along with contact tracing, which involves public health officials tracking down and warning those who may have come in contact with someone who’s tested positive for COVID-19, before restrictions on residents and businesses are lifted. She said it has to be carried out in an organized and “methodical way.”
“How devastating would it be … if we just let everybody out and then suddenly we had another wave of COVID positives and then we had to shut back down?” Duckworth said. “I think that would be worse for our economy than to move forward in a methodical way.”
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