Stevenson’s army, May 18

– I strongly favor a rapid development of an effective and safe vaccine against Covid-19. We all do. But I’m not persuaded that the White House is doing that. On Friday the president announced Operation Warp Speed. He named the head of the Army Materiel Command as “chief operating officer” and a former top official at GlaxoSmithKline as “chief advisor.”  HHS put out a press release promising major activities. But I can’t find anywhere an executive order empowering this WH committee to give orders or allocate funds or do the things an executive agency needs to do. Government needs execution and execution relies on authorities.
– NYT has more on the Pompeo activities that triggered an IG investigation by the now-fired State Dept IG.
– Space Command launches a bidding war for its new HQ. [I’ll bet AF gets the announcement out before Nov 3]
– Politico tells what life is like at WH nowadays because of the coronavirus.

My SAIS colleague Charlie Stevenson distributes this almost daily news digest of foreign/defense/national security policy to “Stevenson’s army” via Googlegroups. I plan to republish here. To get Stevenson’s army by email, send a blank email (no subject or text in the body) to stevensons-army+subscribe@googlegroups.com. You’ll get an email confirming your join request. Click “Join This Group” and follow the instructions to join. Once you have joined, you can adjust your email delivery preferences (if you want every email or a digest of the emails).