COVID-19 ALERT: COVID spending package could shrink to $10 billion due to deadlock -
Lawmakers moved to the brink Thursday of shaking hands on a bipartisan compromise to provide a fresh $10 billion to combat COVID-19, a deal that could set up final congressional approval next week.
“We’ve reached an agreement in principle on all the spending and all of the offsets,” Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah, the lead Republican bargainer, told reporters, using Washington-speak for savings. “It’s entirely balanced by offsets.”“We are getting close to a final agreement that would garner bipartisan support,” he said on the Senate floor. He said lawmakers were still finalizing the bill’s components and language, and awaiting a cost estimate from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.
Many Republicans have been willing to go along with the new expenditures but have insisted on paying for it with unspent funds from previous bills Congress has enacted to address the pandemic. In early March, Biden had requested $22.5 billion in new COVID-19 spending, an amount lawmakers gradually whittled down as they negotiated over how to finance it.
Romney said the $10 billion might include $1 billion for vaccines, treatments and other support for countries overseas. Blunt said that figure seemed unresolved. One third of the earlier, $15.6 billion measure had been slated to go abroad. Since the pandemic began, Congress has approved more than $5 trillion to address the economic and health crises it produced. Only a small fraction of that has been for public health programs like vaccines.