The National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) still has not received the nearly quarter-million personal respirators it ordered from a small business in Georgia, due to “order and shipping backlogs,” an agency spokesperson said Friday.
Under a fixed-price contract, signed April 27 and now valued at $415,000, American Dream Builders LLC was by May 29 to deliver 225,000 KN-95-rated personal respirators to the semiautonomous Department of Energy agency. The National Nuclear Security Administration has now extended the deadline to June 30.
The agency spokesperson would not say whether its vendor had ordered the respirators, whether the China-based manufacturer had fulfilled the order, or whether the respirators had shipped to the U.S. from China. KN-95 is a Chinese standard that is roughly equivalent to the U.S. N95 standard.
Properly fitted, personal respirators that meet these standards can protect wearers from COVID-19: the respiratory disease caused by the novel coronavirus that broke out in Wuhan, China, last year.
When the NNSA ordered the respirators under a small business set-aside contract, it wanted to take delivery by May 15. The date slipped to May 29 after the Food and Drug Administration banned the first model of respirator American Dream Builders wanted to source, then again to the end of June after the backlogs the NNSA cited on Friday.
The NNSA plans to distribute the disposable respirators to contractors and civil servants within its own workforce, and within the broader DOE. The NNSA set 39,000 respirators aside for federal employees, plus 186,000 for contractors, according to the agency’s request for quotations.
