Billions remain unspent, but Democrats are demanding MORE money for pandemic

Fresh off their holiday break, federal lawmakers are beginning to discuss new pandemic stimulus spending. House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-MD) said the Biden administration was “preparing to ask Congress for ‘substantial’ funding to address the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic domestically and abroad.” Hoyer expected the new funding would focus on “testing, vaccines” and “to make sure schools have resources to keep themselves safe.”

If all that sounds familiar, it should, as lawmakers previously allocated hundreds of billions of dollars to these same purposes. Investigators last fall started asking where did all the pandemic money go? Fair question.

Senators Roy Blunt (R-MO) and Richard Burr (R-NC) just asked Education Secretary Miguel Cardona for a breakdown of $266 billion in pandemic education funds, highlighting that $191 billion remained unspent. The same goes for COVID testing. As a recent oped noted, “the country has run short of COVID tests even though some $79 billion – more than the entire GDP of Kenya – was allocated to developing and distributing such tests. Tests, it must be said, that candidate Joe Biden put at the heart of his promise to ‘shut down the virus’ in 2020.”

But these already provided funds are not the only things politicians with big new spending plans have forgotten about in recent months. For instance, Democrats have argued for months that their trillion-dollar Build Back Better plan was needed to prevent the expiration of temporarily enhanced child tax credit payments to over 30 million households. Some even suggested that, without that legislation, the entire child tax credit program would end. But neither characterization is correct, as tens of millions of families are poised to collect the largest payments yet in the coming months under the current temporary policy –without further legislation. – READ MORE