$1 Trillion In Coronavirus ‘Stimulus’ Is Sitting Around Unused While Congress Plans To Rain Down More
February 12, 2021 By Jordan Davidson
As President Joe Biden prepares to jam a $1.9 trillion COVID-19 spending package through a Democrat-controlled Congress without GOP buy-in, more than $1 trillion of Congress’s previous coronavirus spending is still sitting unused.
While some in Congress would argue that much of this money is scheduled to be spent eventually, at least a trillion American dollars are leftovers unspent by the industry or institution they were originally designated to help. According to the Committee For A Responsible Federal Budget, 60 percent of these remaining funds were authorized in the Response and Relief Act, which hurriedly passed in late December of 2020, but some date back to the CARES Act in March.
One authorization in the CARES Act granted federally funded schools resources “for cleaning and disinfecting†as well as “assistance in counseling and distance learning,†but all $100 million dollars dedicated to the pandemic-era education improvements have been left untouched. The Biden administration has been walking back campaign promises to get schools open, for which they insisted huge piles of money were necessary.
Billions of other dollars committed to the nation’s vaccine rollout by Congress, which designated $4 billion of American money to “fund COVID-19 vaccination in low-income countries,†are also left abandoned.
Congress also left billions in unallocated funds across multiple categories including vaccine rollout, the paycheck protection program, and other grants meant to aid Americans following nearly a year of government-mandated lockdowns that wreaked havoc on people’s livelihoods. Congress has not made any plans for how it will pay for all of this spending, especially as lockdowns suppress the nation’s ability to generate the value that underlies tax intake in future years.
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https://thefederalist.com/2021/02/12/1-trillion-in-coronavirus-stimulus-is-sitting-around-unused-while-congress-plans-to-rain-down-more/
