We have plenty of space (churches, meeting halls, school and university dormitories) to use for temporary hospitals w/o the Army building temporary buildings that will cost a fortune and later be torn down all on the taxpayers' dime. Charitable organizations, universities and institutions should be willing to donate those resources.
I don't want to pay the army for building: I want their doctors doing research on a cure/fix for Covid-19 and I want their soldiers alert and ready. It would be cheaper to hire immigrant Mexicans to build temporary hospitals.
Using the army to build hospitals when better space is already is a waste of time, a waste of money and little more than a boondoggle for the suppliers who are chosen.
And isn't this possibly a violation of the posse comitatus Act?
> We have plenty of space (churches, meeting halls, school and university dormitories) to use for temporary hospitals
Making these spaces fit the physical needs of these hospitals (massive power requirements for equipment, hallways and elevators with certain amounts of clearance for transporting patients, extremely well-controlled ventilation systems, sanitizable surfaces everywhere, rooms laid out with central access for doctors and nurses) would take so much time and effort that it would be more money- and time-efficient to build new buildings with the expertise of a group practiced in building new, reasonably high-quality buildings as fast as possible... like, say, the Army.
These need to be modern hospitals, not 19th-century sanitariums where patients just get dumped into a bed and left to die or recover on their own.
> It would be cheaper to hire immigrant Mexicans to build temporary hospitals.
Right, and I'm sure hiring random people to construct temporary buildings as fast as possible would result in something that won't fall in on peoples' heads immediately.
> And isn't this possibly a violation of the posse comitatus Act?
The Posse Comitatus Act applies to the use of the military as law enforcement, so, no.
Posse Comitatus doesn't really apply they're not enforcing a law or acting as a policing force which is all that law actually cares about. The Army Corps of Engineers does a lot of projects like this, it's part of the reason they exist at all. Lots of the flood control along the Mississippi for example are COE works and they come in during emergencies to do stuff like this. For example during Katrina they were the ones repairing the dykes that had failed around New Orleans.
I don't want to pay the army for building: I want their doctors doing research on a cure/fix for Covid-19 and I want their soldiers alert and ready. It would be cheaper to hire immigrant Mexicans to build temporary hospitals.
Using the army to build hospitals when better space is already is a waste of time, a waste of money and little more than a boondoggle for the suppliers who are chosen.
And isn't this possibly a violation of the posse comitatus Act?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posse_Comitatus_Act