New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo describes his meeting with President Donald Trump as productive. The two met at the White House Tuesday afternoon to discuss New York’s COVID-19 testing.
“The meeting went well and I think it was productive,” Andrew Cuomo told MSNBC in a phone interview, according to CNN. “The big issue was testing as everybody knows that's going to be the next step as we go forward.”
Cuomo said that he and Donald Trump worked out how the state and federal governments could cooperate. “And how do we separate the responsibilities and the tasks on testing vis-a-vis a state and the federal government and the acknowledgment that we will need to work together on this,” the New York governor added.
“It has to be a real partnership,” Cuomo said. “And I think we had a very good conversation.”
Andrew Cuomo also revealed that Donald Trump committed at a meeting in Washington Tuesday to “work together” to double New York’s rate of testing for COVID-19, CNBC reported. “It’s a very aggressive goal and we said that we would work together to meet that goal, so it was a very good conversation,” the governor said.
New York is the epicenter of the coronavirus crisis in the country and the state is testing about 20,000 people daily. Doubling that number would mean that it will be doing 40,000 COVID-19 tests per day.
Cuomo said that Trump “seemed very open and understanding” of the states’ need for federal funding while the struggling reopening their respective economies. “The states are in desperate shape and everything’s being left to the states to do the reopening … They don’t provide any funding to the state government,” he said, adding that Trump “said the next piece of legislation that passes, he’s going to be open to that.”
Cuomo acknowledged that it is the states’ responsibility to determine where tests are taken as well as to regulate laboratories under their jurisdiction. However, he also pointed out that it is also the federal government’s role to “make the supply chain work for manufacturers.”