The Biden administration must not realize just how badly it indicts its own policy choices when it takes money meant for virus vaccinations and diverts it to housing for immigrant children.
Yes, you read that correctly: With a worldwide pandemic still raging and with a horrific 1,100 people in the United States, almost all of them unvaccinated, dying from the coronavirus each day for half a month, the administration is diverting money from the vaccination effort. Rather than spend more money fighting a worldwide disaster of China’s making, Joe Biden is using it to handle a domestic disaster of his own making.
Let’s set aside, for now, the question of whether the diversion of $589 million is even legal. Complicated rules govern the leeway of administrations to redirect funds appropriated by Congress. Suffice it to say that whether legal or not, most fund diversions outside a narrow range of alternatives violate the spirit of the constitutional design. Absent clear congressional language allowing significant leeway, agencies may be justified in redirecting, for example, COVID vaccination money for COVID treatments, but on far shakier ground when redirecting funds for an entirely unrelated purpose.
These sorts of issues are increasingly fought in federal courts, with presidents sometimes losing. And even if somehow legal, major diversions usually are misguided. The people vote for representatives, not bureaucrats, to exercise the power of the purse. Any detour from those representatives’ intended road map is ethically problematic.
Again, though, let’s abandon legal theorizing and consider the specific policy merits involved here. Fox News reports: “Of the ARP funding, $187.5 million had been marked for the Centers for Disease Control for ‘vaccine planning, distribution, monitoring and tracking’ and an additional $25 million for ‘vaccine confidence activities.’ Meanwhile $151 million of the diverted funding had been tagged for the ‘Supply Chain for Vaccines, Therapeutics and Medical Supplies.’”
The administration argues the coronavirus money wasn’t being used, because more than 60% of the country has received at least one shot and because the vast majority of the rest refuse to get vaccinated. The administration claims, though, that it inherited a tremendous underfunding for immigrant shelters from the Trump administration, creating a major humanitarian need.
These arguments are specious. By Donald Trump’s final year, border crossings were way down and thus so was the need for migrant housing. The reason the system is underfunded now is that the administration has created a border crisis almost from thin air. It did so by abandoning Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” program, by announcing a six-month moratorium on all deportations, by expressing support for sanctuary cities, and by releasing numerous illegal immigrants into the general population, among other actions that amounted to a giant “welcome” sign on the border. Without the border crisis Biden created, there would have been almost no reason even to consider diverting funds from any other purpose.
Result: Even if, as Biden claims, the vaccination accounts are not needed for vaccinations, the use of the money for border purposes means the money can’t be used in other ways to stem the effects of the pandemic. For example, copious evidence indicates that a treatment called “monoclonal antibodies” is tremendously effective at keeping coronavirus cases from deteriorating into ones bad enough to require hospitalization. Yet even though the administration is trying to get the word out about the treatment, only some 600,000 antibody doses have been administered, from among the nearly 39 million people who have suffered from COVID-19 in the U.S.
Wouldn’t it make sense to spend coronavirus-related money on coronavirus-related treatment? Biden’s own policy choices leave the border a mess while failing to do all that can be done to curb the pandemic.
