Grainger, silent partner in coronavirus contract, sold protective gear to U.S. for double the cost
April 18, 2020, 5:02 PM EDT
By Jonathan Allen, Phil McCausland and Cyrus Farivar
WASHINGTON — It pays to be the middleman — especially in a time of crisis.
For W.W. Grainger Inc., a big industrial supply company, that meant quickly doubling the price of coveralls in a contract with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services that is worth as much as $35.8 million. The short of it: Grainger, acting as the silent partner in a deal between the federal government and two other companies, bought coveralls at $4 apiece from DuPont and then sold them to Uncle Sam for $7.96 apiece.
“Yes, these are the same suits,” a spokesperson for the HHS department said. “Grainger is DuPont’s distributor.” The coveralls are used to protect health care workers, first responders and others from the coronavirus.
For a while, Grainger’s role in the four-way partnership, established through the White House coronavirus task force’s Project Airbridge, was something of a secret.
Under the deal, the U.S. government paid Federal Express to fly Tyvek, a synthetic material, from a DuPont facility in Richmond, Virginia, to Vietnam, where it was sewn into coveralls at a factory that DuPont uses. DuPont first told NBC News that it sold the suits to the federal government, which paid FedEx to fly the finished product back to the U.S.
But DuPont typically doesn’t sell directly to the federal government and it may have needed a partner for immediate entree into the contracting system. A person familiar with the arrangement said the federal government was specifically interested in purchasing DuPont’s Tyvek-based coveralls.
more:
http://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/little-work-grainger-sold-suits-u-s-double-cost-n1187061?cid=eml_nbn_20200419
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