The COVID‐19 pandemic has exposed the opacity of the global personal protective equipment (PPE) supply chain. Additionally, some members of Congress have raised concerns with the program, including but not limited to: the delivery of too few supplies (particularly N95 respirators), the reported involvement of volunteer, privatesector employees in operating the federal initiative, federal pressure for Project Airbridge participants to procure PPE from a particular manufacturer, high prices of transported PPE, and the ability of private-sector partners to determine the recipient of transported PPE. 111 However, the GAO found that as of September 2020, states remained unable to fulfill local requests for certain types of PPE, 112 and FEMA's news releases on Project Airbridge indicated that the program facilitated transport only of a fraction of PPE shipments to the United States (see Figure 2). reported that the air bridge was suspended at the end of June 2020 because private manufacturers and distributors have increased domestic production and international manufacturing capacity, 103 and are using more maritime resources to bring in supplies.

Fema airbridge