Political battles over the response to COVID-19 are here to stay, the latest example being a partisan fight over how to pay for additional relief funds that will go toward testing, vaccines, treatments, and research and development.
The White House is asking Congress to approve $15.6 billion in new COVID-19 spending, making the case in a March 3 document titled “Meeting Urgent Needs,” and the Biden administration and congressional Democrats have been making the case since.
WHITE HOUSE FACES GOP SKEPTICISM OF LATEST COVID-19 SPENDING REQUEST
“For months, we have been engaging Congress about our needs for additional COVID response funds,” said White House press secretary Jen Psaki. “In total, senior administration officials have held more than three dozen calls and meetings with Congress and at least 10 briefings to committees to communicate our needs so that we can do what Americans should expect from their government — protecting them from a once-in-a-generation pandemic.”
Congressional Republicans who have opposed new COVID-19 funding for more than a year have other ideas, wanting more transparency and accountability for how nearly $6 trillion in previously approved funds has been spent.
“President Biden continues to play with American taxpayers’ dollars like it’s Monopoly money,” said House Committee on Oversight and Reform ranking member James Comer. “Last year, Democrats passed and President Biden signed into law a $2 trillion bill for so-called COVID relief, but only 9% actually went to combating the virus. … Biden is requesting more pandemic relief funds when he has consistently wasted, abused, and mismanaged Americans’ hard-earned money.”
Much of the money already approved has been committed for other purposes or cannot easily be repurposed, argues Marc Goldwein, Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget’s senior director of policy. That doesn’t mean Congress needs to approve new spending to fight the virus.
“Do we need the money, and does it need to be new money are two different questions,” he said. “In order to be able to order more treatments and be ready for the next variant and vaccine, it does appear more resources are needed. I believe the White House that more resources are needed.”
The recently approved 2022 omnibus bill did not include $15.6 billion in pandemic funding amid disputes over how to pay for it. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has continued making the case, especially after second gentleman Doug Emhoff and Irish Taoiseach Micheal Martin tested positive for the virus within days of each other.
“I think we need all the money that we can get to have the resources that we need to fight COVID,” Pelosi said. “The last thing we need is another variant. The resources that we would have had in the bill, I think, need to be enhanced.”
There are plenty of ways to do that, argues Goldwein, that don’t involve new spending. In a blog post, CRFB argues that aid can be diverted from states or offset in many other ways, such as closing the carried interest loophole, expanding the cigarette tax to include vaping, or allowing the student loan repayment moratorium to expire as scheduled May 1.
While some people may be surprised that the White House is asking for more funding given how much was already approved, the measures taken in January to fight the omicron variant wave, including free tests and N95 masks, meant the government blew threw the previous round of funding faster than expected.
No matter how its obtained, the money is needed, according to Dr. Amesh Adalja, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security.
“It’s important to remember that COVID-19 is an endemic respiratory infection. It’s not going anywhere,” he said. “We’re going to need these products, and we’re going to need to develop new products.”
One key factor is that many treatments, such as monoclonal antibodies and even diagnostic testing, are available on an emergency use authorization, meaning they can only be purchased through the government. Adalja is neutral on the politics of where the funding comes from, be it an allocation away from states or from congressional salaries, but says the money is needed to be prepared for when hospitalizations begin rising again.
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“We go through these cycles of panic and neglect,” he said. “It’s not really sustainable and ends up putting you back into crisis if something happens.”
