It's been a pretty quiet few weeks for Sen. Chuck Grassley, what with the Senate being out of session and no reporters asking him every day about either Donald Trump or his Supreme Court nominee blockade (it's been 140 days, by the way, since Merrick Garland was nominated). His silence was frankly welcomed, but now he's back doing what he does best—whining, this time over Zika funding.
There's an effort to distort my votes on spending to fight the Zika virus to make it seem as if I don't care about women and children’s health. […]
Before any of those votes took place, at the urging of congressional Republicans, the federal government identified $589 million of money already on hand that could be spent on fighting Zika. This money was largely left over from the Ebola crisis. (Congress approved $5.4 billion emergency funding for Ebola.) The Obama Administration identified this available money in April.
Despite sounding the alarm, the Obama Administration had spent only a portion of that money on Zika as of July 6, according to news reports. I wrote to the agencies seeking answers on why they were slow to distribute Zika funding.
Who's distorting now? Grassley, of course. Set aside the idea that you have to rob one public health crisis fund to respond to another, it's a full month later and yes, the money is running out for the most important programs to fight the disease. Like two programs run by the National Institutes of Health and the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, or BARDA, to create better and faster diagnostic tools as well as to research vaccines. The Office of Management and Budget has alerted Congress that funding for these programs will be exhausted this month. "These are the tools we need to fight the Zika challenge, and we'll be stymied when the funding runs out," says the OMB.
That Grassley is making excuses instead of answering the crisis does pretty much point to his not caring about women and children's health.
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