In the interest of providing much-needed aid to Ukraine, avoiding a government shutdown, and sending as much pork home to their home districts as possible, members of Congress acted on a bipartisan basis this month and passed an omnibus spending bill six months into the fiscal year.
As badly as they behaved in doing this, they at least had the good sense to purge from this 2,700-page monstrosity President Joe Biden’s request for $22.5 billion (later $15.6 billion) in additional funds for COVID relief.
The only danger at this point is that members might go back and decide that it’s worth wasting this money. It isn’t. The feds have failed, despite being pressed repeatedly, to show what happened to all the hundreds of billions spent on COVID already. It is known at this point that a large amount of that money is not being used. In a time when inflation is setting multidecadal records, there is no reason to make things even worse by spending even more money on a situation that is no longer an economic or health emergency.
It is extremely telling that Democrats were so prepared to drop this funding. They are not exactly known for making such compromises, especially when they can claim that public health is at stake. They know it’s not a real emergency, though, and that explains it.
Department of Health and Human Services officials estimated earlier this year that they still had an unobligated $18 billion for testing, mitigation, and contact tracing for COVID. Of that, at least $4.6 billion had not even been designated for any specific use. Of the funds allocated to schools, supposedly to help them reopen with a healthy environment, a much bigger and more disturbing $191 billion remained unspent. State and local governments were supposedly still sitting on most of the $325 billion they received, most of which should never have been distributed in the first place. COVID, after all, was not an excuse to bail out irresponsible state governments that spend beyond their means — looking at you, Illinois.
COVID remains a serious health problem, but the COVID emergency is now in the rearview mirror. There isn’t anything about it so urgent that it cannot wait or, at most, be handled through the reprogramming of money allocated to other purposes.
With his demands for more COVID funds, Biden is reaching for still more money that he can handle and dole out without any accountability.
He and everyone else must abandon this mindset that the nation is at war with a virus. That was once true, but today, the battles have all been fought, and an uneasy detente has been reached. The entire nation needs to be cured of its wartime mindset, which said that extraordinary measures and extraordinarily large sums were justified to accomplish a common purpose. That hasn’t been the case for more than a year now. Biden’s failure to notice this at the inception of his presidency, and his bull-headed insistence on signing a massive American Rescue Plan in early 2021, is part of the reason inflation has eaten away all of the wage gains workers had made before the pandemic began. He cannot blame Russia’s invasion of Ukraine because that only happened three weeks ago.
Instead of demanding more money for a crisis that no longer exists, Biden should start thinking about the future. He has let the inflation genie loose, and it is throwing lightning bolts at the recovering economy he inherited.
