House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi has accused the GOP of leaving “critical” congressional work unfinished when adjourned for the traditional two-week Easter recess.
In a letter to fellow House Democrats on Thursday, Pelosi said Republicans should have kept the House in session in order to consider emergency funding measures to help eradicate the Zika virus and remedy the lead water crisis in Flint, Mich.
“Time is of the essence,” Pelosi said in the letter. “Yet this Republican Congress has wasted week after week on their dead-end special interest agenda, while the priorities of hard-working Americans and desperate families receive nothing but indifference and inaction.”
Pelosi also criticized the GOP for failing to pass a budget resolution before leaving for recess, which she said highlights the division within the House Republican conference.
“The Republican leadership has proposed the most destructive ‘road to ruin’ budget plan in history, and it still isn’t brutal enough to win the support of the radical forces that drive the Republican conference,” Pelosi said.
Republicans are reluctant to take up spending bills that provide new federal money to Flint or for combating Zika.
House Speaker Paul Ryan said this week that the federal government has money that wasn’t spent on the Ebola crisis to help combat Zika, a mosquito-transmitted virus that causes severe birth defects.
House appropriators, Ryan said, “tell us that there is plenty of money in the pipelines right now, money that was not going to Ebola, that was already in the pipelines that can go immediately to Zika.”
Senate Republicans and Democrats have been working on a bipartisan plan to provide additional federal money to Flint, but have not reached a deal.
In February, the House passed a bill requiring the Environmental Protection Agency to notify residents of lead-contaminated water within 24 hours.
