Biden administration officials are asking Congress for billions of dollars in new COVID funding despite surpluses of stimulus money in some states and outstanding questions about where all the previous relief funding was spent.
White House officials have asked Congress for $22.5 billion from Congress, which a senior administration official described this week as “emergency immediate funding.” The official said the funding was necessary to buy more vaccines, COVID therapeutics, and tests.
But Democrats have so far rejected a plan to retrieve extra COVID money from states that have surpluses, amid Republican demands that the new funding request draw money from existing COVID cash stockpiles.
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President Joe Biden’s political path to getting the funds has been complicated by the fact that his health agencies and advisers have essentially declared the emergency portion of the pandemic over, even as those same agencies clamor for emergency levels of cash.
Biden officials this week cited previous examples of COVID funding votes in Congress — most of which took place when businesses were shuttered, the virus was raging, and lawmakers from both parties agreed on the severity of the pandemic — as reasons why Congress should again join together and approve vast sums of money.
“I will say that there is precedence, including in the prior administration multiple times, to provide direct COVID response funding on a bipartisan basis without offsets,” a senior administration official said Tuesday. “And so, we hope and expect that we’ll be able to rely on that precedent moving forward.”
But the senior administration officials laid out some reasons for needing the latest influx of funding that were based on hypotheticals and long-term health planning — such as in the event a fourth booster shot is recommended for all or if a more deadly variant arises in the future — and not on the kinds of concrete, immediate needs that informed previous COVID packages.
Pfizer has sought approval for another booster shot for adults 65 and older, but has not yet signaled that an additional shot will be necessary for all.
What’s more, Democrats nixed a proposal that could have covered a significant portion of the money the Biden administration now says it needs.
An initial plan originally included in the government funding bill Congress passed last week would have provided roughly $7 billion of the new COVID funding by taking it back from cities and states, but Speaker Nancy Pelosi stripped the provision out of the final product amid blowback from some Democratic lawmakers.
A number of state and local governments that received piles of cash from Biden’s $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan last year ended up collecting far more in revenue than they expected, leaving some with massive surpluses that Republicans wanted to claw back to fund things such as COVID therapies and testing sites.
The American Rescue Plan alone had given $350 billion in assistance to state and local governments.
Many cities and states have used the COVID funding they received, thanks to the few strings the government attached, to pay for things that have little to do with the virus.
Los Angeles, for example, used some of the funds to set up free legal representation for undocumented immigrants. Boston spent millions of the funds on a “youth green jobs” program.
Republicans also questioned where all of the $5.7 trillion in total assistance that Congress has approved through several different COVID packages has gone.
Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley told the Washington Examiner last week that the Biden administration “must provide a detailed breakdown of how the federal government has disbursed the $6 trillion Congress already approved to fight the pandemic” before officials request any additional COVID funding.
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And in recent months, Biden and blue-state leaders have worked to paint a picture of life returning to normal after the virus, sunsetting mask and vaccine mandates and encouraging people to learn to live with the virus.
That has made securing a burst of new COVID funding politically difficult for Democrats — especially when Republicans plan in the midterm elections to blame the last major COVID bill for inflation and hammer Democrats for supporting COVID restrictions far longer than their GOP counterparts.
