While the eyes of the world are on Russia and Ukraine battling it out over whether the latter deserves the right to exist, Congress was able to pass a massive spending bill that in part authorized quite a bit of aid to the Ukrainians. What was barely noticed was what was cut out from the bill entirely: $15 billion for the COVID-19 Response Fund.
Senate Republicans on Tuesday held firm in their reluctance to approve roughly $15 billion in new coronavirus aid, even as the White House warned anew that congressional inaction threatened to imperil the country’s ability to deliver tests, therapeutics and vaccines.
The stalemate left Washington scrambling to find solutions for the second consecutive week, while the future of the U.S. government’s pandemic response appeared to hang in the balance — stymied not by a vexing new pathogen but a now-familiar political battle over federal spending.
This diary is a call to action because #CovidIsNotOver. In fact, many experts predict yet another surge in cases due to omicron BA.2 starting in 2-4 weeks from now. This impasse in funding comes at EXACTLY the wrong time. But what does the aid actually do? Where is the holdup? What can we do about it? All of those questions can be answered below the fold.
What does this funding do? Is it necessary?
I usually do not post an entire twitter thread unroll (monetization issues), but this one summarizes what is at stake much more succinctly than I could ever do with my words. Dr. Eric Fiegl-Ding once again is spot on. PLEASE CLICK BELOW TO SEE WHAT IS AT STAKE.
In an MSNBC op-ed, Dr. Kavita Patel blasts Congress for the horse trading and sausage making that even put this funding under threat.
To some people, that might not seem like such a big deal. Those who know the government can run on a deficit may assume that possibility will come into play or that some budget wonk will find funding from somewhere else. That is not the case.
What follows is a timeline of what the conscious indifference from Democrats bolstered by the callousness of Republicans will most likely mean for Americans.
His timeline of what programs have to be cancelled and when due to the funding shortage is nothing short of chilling. If BA.2 explodes like in Hong Kong or South Korea, we may be in for a world of hurt in 2-3 months.
Sadly, this pattern of panic about a new disease and then neglect when it dies down is nothing new. Ed Yong writes probably the most soul-sucking article of this crisis for the Atlantic. In it, he describes what happened to funding cycles for various diseases such as Ebola and Zika. Once those died down, the funding for those diseases was quickly eliminated. This is what is so new and concerning this time around…
Even so, it’s not meant to happen this quickly. When I first wrote about the panic-neglect cycle five years ago, I assumed that it would operate on a timescale of years, and that neglect would set in only after the crisis was over. The coronavirus pandemic has destroyed both assumptions. Before every surge has ended, pundits have incorrectly predicted that the current wave would be the last, or claimed that lifesaving measures were never actually necessary. Time and again, neglect has set in within mere months, often before the panic part has been over. The U.S. funds pandemic preparedness “like Minnesota snow,” Michael Osterholm, an epidemiologist at the University of Minnesota, told me in 2018. “There’s a lot in January, but in July it’s all melted.”
Yong continues the article by describing that the Republicans are arguing in bad faith. The crisis has NOT passed, the funding is for an endemic disease, and it will be too late if another crisis with COVID-19 rears its ugly head again.
No es bueno!
What’s the holdup? Why did the funding get pulled entirely?
This part does NOT wish to assign blame on the Democratic Party. If you want pie fights, make your own diary. This crisis is too acute to play purity games within the caucus. We should be attacking the group that is leading to this crisis — the GQP taking yet another critical fund hostage in an attempt to cripple Biden.
- The Republicans are dead set against any new spending on the COVID-19 aid. Not $1. Not $15 billion. This means that they would invoke cloture in the Senate and kill the bill. They offered the compromise to claw back funds that are sitting in state accounts to pay for the necessary funding.
- Enough Democrats in the House objected to this tactical maneuver that passage of the amendment for this funding would not have passed the House, where we have a razor thin majority. It looks like most of the objections were from Democrats in states that have yet to spend their funds.
- Pelosi had to strip the funding entirely out of the spending bill in order not to risk the entire bill. Personally, I would have kept it in and DARED Republicans to block it, but that would involve taking a gamble Democrats traditionally refuse to take. They love keeping their powder dry.
- Negotiations are ongoing to try and find a way to pass this Covid-19 aid without a fierce partisan battle.
Since then, the following explanations and events have occurred.
This letter from Pelosi to Dems is worth reading in its entirety. It is a very rare show of anger at her own caucus and a rebuke of some of them for opposing the plan to make sure funding stays in the bill. Most of the anger is directed at the GOP of course!
1) Cori Bush from Missouri put out a statement via twitter
2) Governor Tony Evers of Wisconsin put out a press release.
3) This Politico piece notes that:
Several members from impacted states, including Reps. Mark Pocan (D-Wis.), Dean Phillips (D-Minn.), Angie Craig (D-Minn.) and Debbie Dingell (D-Mich.), streamed through Pelosi’s office on Wednesday afternoon as the caucus scrambled for a solution.
Unfortunately, the funding mechanisms for state aid were very complex. It looks like the funds were split in between two payments which 30 states took already. There really isn’t that much money to claw back. Some states are still sitting on the entire pot because of GOP obstructionism at the state level vs. a Democratic governor. My home state of Michigan is a perfect example of this intransigence.
It gets more complicated than that. The split payments were REQUIRED except for those states with an unemployment 2 percentage points above its pre-pandemic level. This funding mechanism doesn’t have much to claw back it seems.
Sausage making isn’t pretty, so now the question is what next.
What Can We Do About this Crisis?
Probably the most important thing you can do is continue protecting yourself against the virus by doing all of the preventative measures you have been doing for the past two years. Keep on that mask, stay away from other people and social distance, wash your hands and wipe down heavily used and shared objects, and make sure you have taken the booster shot.
Otherwise, there are two possible avenues Democrats could take.
1. Pass the $15 billion Covid-19 Response Fund as a standalone bill in the House, and dare Republicans to block it in the Senate. This is a risky gambit, given that Manchinema haven’t publicly made their statements on whether they support more funding. Either way, the bill won’t pass cloture at this time and the two headed obstruction in the Democratic Senate refuses to eliminate the filibuster. This is a grandstand play meant to gin up enough outrage to force the GOP to negotiate. Good luck with that, as the GOP has no shame. The GOP also thinks it can win this fight, and I tend to agree.
Elaine Godfrey also agrees in her column for the Atlantic. She writes:
Politically, Republicans feel safe making this argument. New cases of COVID have been decreasing for weeks, and hospitalizations are on the decline too. Most cities that had mask mandates have gotten rid of them. Many Americans tell pollsters that they’re ready for the country to move on; people are focused on other issues, such as Russia’s war in Ukraine and rising gas prices. But more than 1,000 people are still dying every day from COVID. Experts predict that the new BA.2 subvariant could be the dominant strain in the United States in a matter of weeks.
In other words, refusing to approve new funding is a risk. “People want us to be prepared in advance and stabilized,” the Democratic pollster Celinda Lake told me. “Republicans are voting against both.” If COVID gets much worse over the next few months, Democrats will rush to blame the GOP, especially if Republican members strike down a stand-alone vote on COVID relief. “They’re forcing a situation that’s going to make it worse for them” in November, Lake said. Of course, by election season, a spring debate over COVID funding will be a distant memory. If a new variant has overwhelmed the country by then, the partisan discourse will probably center on mask mandates and vaccines instead. Perhaps Republicans are right to bet that voters won’t punish them for blocking new funding.
2. Attempt to compromise with the Senate Republicans and find somewhere else to claw back the money from. This runs the risk of Democratic defections in the House, but this is the safer play. The two groups could compromise and come up with an ARPA like agreement which gives Biden greater flexibility to spend pandemic funds already allocated. Biden could find things we are not needing to spend money on and direct this to more critical needs. This is what needs to be done, and those unhappy about it need to remember that if we are caught unprepared for BA.2, THE BIDEN ADMINISTRATION will be blamed, NOT THE GOP.
Either way, there will need to be an increased pressure campaign on your members of Congress to pass SOMETHING soon. While it feels like contacting your Representative and Senator is pointless, if enough people do it the collective action freaks them into more sense. Do know that certain avenues to reach a staffer (the actual members NEVER answer) are better than others.
A) Send a letter by snail mail. Seriously. So few people do it these days that it makes a point. This is what gives the highest chance of being read as well.
B) Phone calls. You may get a busy signal and you may get a lot of canned responses, but eventually a staffer picks up. They tally the calls made for and against every issue. Obviously, we know which way we want the tally to go.
C) E-mail. This is the quickest and least effective means of contact. Unless it is seeking help from their office (constituent outreach), expect a canned and automated message back. Again, the tally may be logged, but I bet the system bogs down with thousands of e-mails daily and is mostly ignored.
Find your Representative and their email: https://www.house.gov/representatives
Find your Senator and their email: https://www.senate.gov/senators/senators-contact.htm
Call the House member by using https://directory.house.gov/ to find their office number.
Call the Senate members by using https://contactsenators.com/senator-phone-numbers to find their office phone number.
Mail to the House by using: https://www.house.gov/doing-business-with-the-house/leases/contact-us
Mail to the Senate by using: https://contactsenators.com/senator-mailing-addresses
Thank you for reading this far, and I hope that I have inspired you to take action to prevent an acute COVID crisis in 2-3 months time!
