The Trump administration is trying to block billions of dollars for states to conduct testing and contact tracing in the upcoming coronavirus relief bill, people involved in the talks said Saturday.
The administration is also trying to block billions of dollars that GOP senators want to allocate for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and billions more for the Pentagon and State Department to address the pandemic at home and abroad, the people said.
The administration’s posture has angered some GOP senators, the officials said, and some lawmakers are trying to push back and ensure that the money stays in the bill. The officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity to reveal confidential deliberations, cautioned that the talks were fluid and the numbers were in flux.
The negotiations center around a bill Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) is preparing to unveil this coming week as part of negotiations with Democrats on what will likely be the last major coronavirus relief bill before the November election.
The regime is prepared to run out to clock at this point in order to burn is all down before November.
The two political parties are far apart on a number of contentious issues, such as unemployment insurance, but the conflict between Trump administration officials and Senate Republicans on money for testing and other priorities is creating a major complication even before bipartisan negotiations get under way. Some lawmakers are trying to reach a deal quickly, as enhanced unemployment benefits for millions of Americans are set to expire in less than two weeks.
One person involved in the talks said Senate Republicans were seeking to allocate $25 billion for states to conduct testing and contact tracing, but that certain administration officials want to zero out the testing and tracing money entirely. Some White House officials believe they have already approved billions of dollars in assistance for testing and that some of that money remains unspent.
Roughly 3.7 million Americans have already tested positive for coronavirus in the United States, according to a Washington Post analysis. Wait times for test results can vary by state, but in some places people have to wait more than a week to find out if they have tested positive.
Trump and other White House officials have been pushing for states to own more of the responsibility for testing and have objected to creating national standards, at times seeking to minimize the federal government’s role.
The last major coronavirus spending bill Congress approved, in April, included $25 billion to increase testing and also required the Health and Human Services Department to release a strategic testing plan. The agency did so in May, but the plan mainly reasserted the administration’s insistence that states -- not the federal government -- should take the lead on testing.
Several Senate Republicans including Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) are exploring pushing a testing and tracing provision in the next stimulus package but are expected to meet resistance from the White House.
“Cases and deaths are now both rising again, including in many red states,” said Sam Hammond, a policy expert at the right-leaning think tank the Niskanen Center, which has been working with Senate Republicans on testing legislation. “Senate Republicans have asked for funding to help states purchase test kits in bulk. As it currently stands, the main bottleneck to a big ramp-up in testing is less technical than the White House’s own intransigence.”
That may be true, but the White House is going to make sure Senate Republicans go down with him. Either agree with the ridiculous regime theory that cutting testing will cut cases, and that state governors are fully responsible, not Trump, or there's no bill and the misery factor will ensure scorched earth awaits politicians in relatively safe races (and may take out some Democrats with the sheer amount of collateral damage.)
But the real threat is to the tens of millions of Americans who are in true need of help right now, and Trump is signaling his intention to turn his back on them and let the chips fall where they may.
In other words, if Trump loses, America loses.
As horrific is that is, it's what we now face: a leader who will take as many of us as possible with him should he not be publicly absolved for his sins. He sees COVID-19 efforts as "efforts to blame me for this" and he will fight both until the bitter, bitter end.
Nothing about COVID-19 will improve in the US as long as Trump remains in power. Period.
And we know this because we know he gave up on fixing COVID-19 months ago.
Each morning at 8 as the coronavirus crisis was raging in April, Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff, convened a small group of aides to steer the administration through what had become a public health, economic and political disaster.
Seated around Mr. Meadows’s conference table and on a couch in his office down the hall from the Oval Office, they saw their immediate role as practical problem solvers. Produce more ventilators. Find more personal protective equipment. Provide more testing.
But their ultimate goal was to shift responsibility for leading the fight against the pandemic from the White House to the states. They referred to this as “state authority handoff,” and it was at the heart of what would become at once a catastrophic policy blunder and an attempt to escape blame for a crisis that had engulfed the country — perhaps one of the greatest failures of presidential leadership in generations.
Over a critical period beginning in mid-April, President Trump and his team convinced themselves that the outbreak was fading, that they had given state governments all the resources they needed to contain its remaining “embers” and that it was time to ease up on the lockdown.
In doing so, he was ignoring warnings that the numbers would continue to drop only if social distancing was kept in place, rushing instead to restart the economy and tend to his battered re-election hopes.
Casting the decision in ideological terms, Mr. Meadows would tell people: “Only in Washington, D.C., do they think that they have the answer for all of America.”
For scientific affirmation, they turned to Dr. Deborah L. Birx, the sole public health professional in the Meadows group. A highly regarded infectious diseases expert, she was a constant source of upbeat news for the president and his aides, walking the halls with charts emphasizing that outbreaks were gradually easing. The country, she insisted, was likely to resemble Italy, where virus cases declined steadily from frightening heights.
On April 11, she told the coronavirus task force in the Situation Room that the nation was in good shape. Boston and Chicago are two weeks away from the peak, she cautioned, but the numbers in Detroit and other hard-hit cities are heading down.
A sharp pivot soon followed, with consequences that continue to plague the country today as the virus surges anew.
Even as a chorus of state officials and health experts warned that the pandemic was far from under control, Mr. Trump went, in a matter of days, from proclaiming that he alone had the authority to decide when the economy would reopen to pushing that responsibility onto the states. The government issued detailed reopening guidelines, but almost immediately, Mr. Trump began criticizing Democratic governors who did not “liberate” their states.
Mr. Trump’s bet that the crisis would fade away proved wrong. But an examination of the shift in April and its aftermath shows that the approach he embraced was not just a misjudgment. Instead, it was a deliberate strategy that he would stick doggedly to as evidence mounted that, in the absence of strong leadership from the White House, the virus would continue to infect and kill large numbers of Americans.
Trump was trying to blame governors for everything from day one. Now he's ready to bring down America in order to coerce people into saving his relection prospects. It's not just the biggest modern failure in decades, it's outright criminal dereliction of his oath of office.
If we survive the next six months and emerge with President Biden, the reckoning has to be both swift and brutal. If we still have Trump in charge in January, then America, and millions of us, are
dead.
It really is that simple.
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