(The Center Square) — Former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo is expected to be grilled by House Republicans on Tuesday over his administration’s handling of the response to the COVID-19 pandemic in long-term care facilities.
The Republican-controlled Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic will hear testimony from Cuomo focusing on the controversial guidance issued by his administration that required nursing homes and long-term care facilities in New York to admit COVID-19-positive patients.
Cuomo, a Democrat who stepped down from office in 2021 amid sexual harassment allegations, previously testified before the oversight committee in June, when he was peppered with questions by GOP lawmakers for several hours in the closed-door hearing.
Following that hearing, Republican lawmakers accused Cuomo of being “callous” about COVID-19 deaths in his state and for refusing to accept responsibility for his actions.
“Andrew Cuomo owes answers to the 15,000 families who lost loved ones in New York’s nursing homes during the COVID-19 pandemic,” the committee’s chairman, Rep. Brad Wenstrup, R-Ohio, said in a statement ahead of Tuesday’s hearing. “A true leader owns up to his mistakes and takes responsibility for wrongdoing. That is not what we saw from Mr. Cuomo during his term as governor nor during his transcribed interview.”
Cuomo has criticized the House committee for conducting a “partisan” investigation and accused Republican lawmakers of trying to “weaponize people’s pain to advance a political agenda.”
In an op-ed that ran in New York newspapers over the weekend, Cuomo pushed back on claims that New York miss-handled the response to the COVID-19 outbreak and turned the blame on then-President Donald Trump and Republicans in Congress for bungling the national response to the deadly virus.
“The Republicans on the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic have been obviously political and aggressive, but the one place they won’t look is in the mirror and the one word they won’t utter is ‘Trump’ – the president of the United States at the time,” Cuomo wrote. “Trump played politics with the virus and the virus won. His failure to lead was bad government and bad policies.”
The controversy over deaths in New York’s nursing homes following a controversial COVID-19 patient admission policy at the outset of the pandemic has dogged Cuomo for years.
The policy directed nursing homes to begin accepting “medically stable” patients recovering from the virus in 2020 as they were discharged from hospitals. It was rescinded after several weeks, but Cuomo was widely criticized for contributing to the high death toll in the state’s long-term care facilities.
The U.S. Department of Justice announced in 2021 that it had decided not to investigate whether Cuomo’s policy violated residents’ civil rights in New York’s nursing homes. Cuomo also faced a probe by the Manhattan District Attorney’s office, which was later abandoned.
The House committee has also requested COVID-19-related records from Pennsylvania, Michigan and New Jersey, Democrat-led states that adopted similar rules that it has claimed “may have resulted in the deaths of thousands of elderly nursing home residents.”
More than 80,000 New Yorkers died of COVID-19 from the beginning of the pandemic to May 2023, including 15,000 nursing home residents, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
In June, an independent report slammed Cuomo’s “top down” response to the COVID-19 pandemic in New York, saying it created a lack of communication between state agencies and nursing homes that resulted in wasted resources and mistrust by the public, among other missteps.
Tuesday’s oversight hearing will be livestreamed.
