House lawmakers introduced a plan to provide more than $600 million to fight the Zika virus, less than half of the $1.9 billion that President Obama asked for.
The House Appropriations Committee introduced legislation for $622 million to fight Zika, much less than the amount Obama asked for in February and setting up a conflict with Senate proposals that would add up to $1.9 billion in new funding.
A major difference from the Senate legislation is that it doesn’t include new funding, a key request from Democrats.
The House proposal would be paid through existing funds that include unspent dollars fighting the Ebola outbreak. The bill takes $352 million from leftover funds to fight the Ebola virus and $270 million in unused funding from the administration.
Administration officials and many Democrats have vehemently opposed taking money from the Ebola outbreak to pay for Zika.
“This legislation will make dollars available to fight the disease now, prioritizing critical activities that must begin immediately, such as vaccine development and mosquito control,” said House Appropriations Committee Chairman Hal Rogers, R-Ky. “The legislation funds these efforts in a responsible way, using existing resources – including excess funding left over from the Ebola outbreak – to pay for it.”
The House panel said the administration still hasn’t answered its questions regarding how the money from the request will be spent.
“The administration has still not provided full accounting and justification for its request for Zika funds,” the committee said. “Given this lack of complete information and the need to act quickly, independent determinations on necessary funding levels and federal activities to fight Zika in the current fiscal year were made.”
The panel added that any future funding for Zika would be made during the 2017 appropriations process.
White House officials and House Democrats have been saying for weeks that Republicans are ignoring a looming public health crisis.
Zika normally causes a mild illness, but it is also linked to a birth defect called microcephaly and may cause a nerve disorder called Guillain-Barre syndrome. Federal officials worry about limited outbreaks this summer with mosquitoes starting to crop up.
The bill would give the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention $120 million to fight mosquitoes, which spread the Zika virus through biting people. That amount is a far cry from the $800 million the agency asked for in the president’s request.
The National Institutes of Health would get $230 million to support the clinical development of new vaccines to prevent Zika. NIH officials have said that without new funding, efforts to get a vaccine by 2017 will stall.
Meanwhile, the Senate is expected to hold votes this week on three funding packages that would add up to $1.9 billion in federal funding to combat the virus.
