The people of the United States are desperately in need of coronavirus relief, but Senate Republicans larded up their “HEALS” bill with $30 billion in defense funding. Just for starters, the bill slashes the special COVID-19 unemployment benefit by $400 a week, leaving the millions of people put out of work by the pandemic struggling. It doesn’t have elections or Postal Service funding. Its schools funding is pitifully inadequate and structured to force schools to reopen before it’s safe. It fails to fund state and local governments—and without federal funding, the Economic Policy Institute estimates 5.3 million jobs will be lost by the end of 2021.
But F-35 fighters? Apache helicopters? Those are coronavirus relief priorities for Senate Republicans. Senate Appropriations Committee Chair Richard Shelby put $8 billion in funding for military hardware in the bill. That includes $2.2 billion for shipbuilding, $1.4 billion for C-130 transport planes and F-35 fighters, $1.1 billion for Poseidon surveillance jets, and $283 million for Apache helicopters. Those are all manufactured by defense contractors with big lobbying budgets, and they’re all unrelated to coronavirus relief.
Not only are Senate Republicans putting $30 billion in unrelated defense spending into a bill in which they’re shorting the needs of school kids, teachers, millions of people who’ve lost their jobs because of the pandemic, and state and local governments, but part of the Pentagon money is to replace projects that lost funding to Donald Trump’s wall.
“In one example,” The Washington Post reports, “the administration sought to zero out a $261 million account for the Navy’s Expeditionary Fast Transport ship. The coronavirus bill would put $260 million back into this program. The ship is built by Austal USA, based in Shelby’s home state, Alabama.” That’s not the only money that would go to Alabama, either.
Shelby defends the military funding as related to jobs, because “The defense industrial base—a lot of it's been eroded right now. A lot of people are off from work.” Yet somehow his worry about jobs ends there and doesn’t extend to helping state and local governments with budgets hammered by the pandemic, despite the threat of millions of jobs lost if that help doesn’t come.
So what Senate Republicans want to give us is a bill that doesn’t offer many of the most pressing kinds of relief, the relief needed to keep the U.S. out of a depression, but does include massive amounts of military funding, including to cover over the money Trump stripped out of previously funded projects to build his failure of a racist wall. Dead on arrival does not begin to describe this bill. But it’s a great example of what the Republican Party is—the cruelty, the disregard for working families, and the corruption are not just coming from Donald Trump. This is the whole party.