Republicans pitch coronavirus response plan -- inspired by a reality-TV show

Two leading Senate Republicans have a plan to fix President Donald Trump's coronavirus testing failures -- and it resembles a reality-TV show.

The show in question is not "The Apprentice," but "Shark Tank." The ABC show features entrepreneurs making business pitches to a panel of investors, who decide whether or not the idea is funded. Both shows were created by Mark Burnett.

The chairmen of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee and the Senate’s health appropriations subcommittee pitched their idea to the readers of The Washington Post.

"We propose a competitive 'shark tank' — much like the reality-TV show about entrepreneurs, but this time utilizing the capacities of government itself, in coordination with the private sector — to pull out all the stops and create new technologies designed to produce tens of millions of diagnostic tests by August," Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-TV) and Sen. Roy Blunt (R-MO) wrote.

"We must invite breakthrough ideas to our so-called shark tank," the two Senate Republicans argued."We must innovate."

"By incorporating a shark tank environment in government research, we can more quickly develop the necessary technologies to get more tests into circulation. While there is a risk of failure with any research — in science, success is not guaranteed — we also could produce the one mighty great white shark that will help us combat this disease," they wrote.