Since November 4, the huge Ebola crisis that was going to engulf the whole of the U.S. has pretty much gone up in smoke. There's no political utility left in it, so you sure aren't going to hear Republicans talking about it. So President Obama is
reminding them it's still an urgent problem in a speech to the National Institutes of Health on Tuesday.
With just days to go before Congress must fund the government, fears are mounting that the administration’s request for billions of dollars to help combat Ebola will go underfunded or even unaddressed.[…]
When the White House unveiled its request for $6.2 billion in emergency funding on Nov. 12, there was bipartisan consensus that quick action was required. The top Democrat and Republican appropriators in the Senate indicated their support and openness respectively. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) called the funding one of the top priorities in the lame-duck Congress. Speaker John Boehner's (R-Ohio) office said it would review the request.
Since then, crickets. The last U.S. patient has been cured. No new cases have emerged among the people who had close contact with any patient in the U.S. The issue has lost all political steam for lawmakers in this country, but it's still ravaging West Africa. Here's what the president is asking for, and renewing his push for on Tuesday:
$4.64 billion for an immediate Ebola response and $1.54 billion for a contingency fund for future epidemics (for a total of $6.18 billion). Of that first tranche, $1.83 billion would go to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for disease detection and readiness; $238 million for the NIH for treatments and therapies; $25 million to the FDA, $1.98 billion to USAID to assist with recovery in Ebola-infected areas, $127 million to the State Department to aid international partners; and $112 million to the Defense Department for infrastructure and research.
Right now, that's all subject to the whims of House Republicans, and whether they have a government shutdown over immigration or not, or even whether they decide to do an omnibus spending bill that would include the funds. They could just settle on another continuing resolution to keep government going along at current funding levels, which would mean none of this targeted $4.64 billion Ebola funding.