COVID-19 funding that the White House says is \u201curgent\u201d for buying new treatments, developing next-generation vaccines and more is now in serious jeopardy after it was stripped out of the government funding bill.<\/p>\n
Speaker\u00a0Nancy Pelosi\u00a0(D-Calif.) confirmed the news in a “Dear Colleague” letter on Wednesday afternoon, largely blaming Republicans for the impasse that sparked the stunning last-minute revision to the larger spending package.<\/p>\n
\u201cBecause of Republican insistence \u2014 and the resistance by a number of our Members to making those offsets \u2014 we will go back to the Rules Committee to remove COVID funding and accommodate the revised bill,\u201d she wrote. \u201cWe must proceed with the omnibus today, which includes emergency funding for Ukraine and urgent funding to meet the needs of America\u2019s families.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cIt is heartbreaking to remove the COVID funding, and we must continue to fight for urgently needed COVID assistance,\u201d she continued, \u201cbut unfortunately that will not be included in this bill.\u201d<\/p>\n
Pelosi placed the blame largely on Republicans, but it was irate members of her own caucus who ultimately forced her hand.<\/p>\n
The dispute:\u00a0<\/strong>The move came after a tumultuous morning of internal talks between Pelosi, leaders of the Appropriations Committee and other key panels, and a number of lawmakers who were up in arms that the $1.5 trillion omnibus spending package \u2014 released just hours earlier \u2014 proposed to offset $15.6 billion in new COVID-19 spending by clawing back unspent money sent to certain states as part of the $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief bill signed by\u00a0President Biden\u00a0one year ago.<\/p>\n It was lawmakers from those states who threatened to block passage of the omnibus unless the clawback provision was removed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" COVID-19 funding that the White House...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-45849","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-health","category-u-s-a"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45849","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=45849"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45849\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":45850,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45849\/revisions\/45850"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=45849"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=45849"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=45849"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}