The White House said Tuesday that with no new coronavirus funding on the horizon, it was already scaling back plans to purchase monoclonal antibody medicines to prevent and treat covid-19 and will stop reimbursing medical providers who provide covid care for the uninsured in early April unless more money is approved.
While senior administration officials made an appeal for $22.5 billion in additional federal funding, prospects for an emergency aid package appeared dim on Capitol Hill. The No. 2 Republican in the Senate, John Thune of South Dakota, said a bill to provide the money would be "a much heavier lift" if the administration did not come up with ways to offset the cost.
Republican senators, who are demanding a better accounting of how the Biden administration has already spent hundreds of billions in pandemic aid, are digging in. They want it to be paid for by repurposing funds from other programs.
Sen. Roy Blunt of Missouri, the top Republican on the committee that controls health spending, said he spoke to Jeffrey Zients, President Joe Biden's coronavirus response coordinator, on Tuesday about the impasse. Like many other Republican senators, he said he supported buying more therapeutics, tests and vaccines -- but with a catch.
"My advice to them is, be as transparent as you can possibly be with what money's left and where it would be spent, if it's spent the way it was designated, and how much money you need, and how long that will last," Blunt said.
Senior administration officials, speaking on a conference call with reporters, repeated their initial request for the full $22.5 billion in new money. That amount was slashed by Congress to $15.6 billion, but even that is now hanging in the balance.
Lawmakers stripped covid relief funding out of the spending bill they passed last week because of a dispute over whether $7 billion of the money should come from funds allocated to the states.
With coronavirus cases rising in parts of Europe, some Asian countries experiencing severe outbreaks, and public health experts warning of the possibility of another variant or a summer or fall surge in the United States, the Biden administration is increasingly worried that without more money, it will be caught unprepared.
Biden's new coronavirus response plan, outlined earlier this month, included plans to secure more antiviral pills; to build up testing capacity; and to accelerate development of the next generation of vaccines, with the hope that one might protect against multiple variants. Without funding from Congress, officials warned, those plans are in jeopardy.
White House officials have repeatedly said they were out of money for vaccines, testing and treatment. On Tuesday's call, administration officials, who declined to be identified by name, offered more specifics than in the past. They said the administration wanted to place new orders for monoclonal antibody treatments -- including Evusheld, a drug authorized to protect high-risk American from covid-19 -- by the end of March but would be unable to do so without additional funding.
The federal government has been purchasing the treatments from manufacturers and providing them to the public free of charge. But in order to keep the treatments free for as long as possible, senior officials said, the administration expects to cut back on the quantities shipped to states beginning next week.
On Capitol Hill, the fate of the covid relief bill is unclear. House Democrats discussed bringing the measure to the floor for a vote this week, but it was unclear whether they would do so if the measure were not guaranteed to pass the Senate.
House Democrats initially thought they had addressed Republicans' objections by taking money from other programs to offset the $15.6 billion, including $7 billion from relief funds allocated to the states. But governors balked at that, prompting House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to withdraw the covid funding from the $1.5 trillion comprehensive spending package that was approved last week.
AID FOR UKRAINE
Biden on Tuesday signed a bill providing $13.6 billion in additional military and humanitarian aid to Ukraine as part of a $1.5 trillion government spending measure that omits covid-19 aid the White House says is urgently needed.
The covid spending was a casualty of negotiations over the larger government bill. The White House had asked for $22.5 billion for vaccines and treatment, but that was trimmed during talks to $15.6 billion and ultimately dropped altogether as rank-and-file Democrats rebelled against proposed cuts in state aid to pay for the new spending.
"We have made tremendous progress in our fight against covid-19 but our work isn't done," Biden tweeted Tuesday. "We need Congress to immediately provide $22.5 billion in emergency funding to sustain our nation's covid-19 response."
In a Tuesday call with governors, Zients highlighted "severe consequences" that the lack of additional funding would have on the nation's response, including federal support for states, according to an administration official.
"With cases rising abroad, scientific and medical experts have been clear that in the next couple of months, there could be increasing cases of covid-19 here in the United States as well," said White House press secretary Jen Psaki. "Waiting to provide funding until we're in a worse spot ...will be too late. We need funding now."
The $1.5 trillion bill to fund the government for the current year that runs through Sept. 30 is being enacted five months behind schedule. But the money for Ukraine to fight Russia's invasion became a bipartisan rallying point for the measure as Congress urged Biden to take more aggressive steps against Russian President Vladimir Putin.
"Putin's aggression against Ukraine has united people all across America, united our two parties in Congress, and united the freedom loving world," said Biden.
Roughly half the $13.6 billion would arm Ukraine and cover the Pentagon's costs for sending U.S. troops to other Eastern European nations that might see the war spill past their borders. Much of the rest is for humanitarian and economic assistance, strengthening regional allies' defenses and protecting their energy supplies and cybersecurity needs.
The $1.5 trillion government spending bill includes a nearly 7% increase for domestic initiatives, with beefed-up spending for schools, housing, child care, renewable energy, biomedical research, law enforcement grants to communities and feeding programs. It also directs money to minority communities and historically black colleges, renews efforts aimed at preventing domestic violence against women and requires infrastructure operators to report serious hacking incidents to federal authorities.
Republicans won an almost 6% boost for defense and prevailed in retaining decades-old restrictions against using federal money to pay for nearly all abortions.
PANDEMIC-RESPONSE PROBE
Also on Tuesday, a Senate panel voted overwhelmingly to establish an independent task force to probe the U.S. response to the pandemic -- the closest lawmakers have come to supporting such an investigation, two years into the crisis.
The vote on that bipartisan legislation, part of the Prevent Pandemics Act advanced by the Senate's health committee, is the first step in a fraught political journey, and comes as Democrats and Republicans have pursued their own probes, seeking to shape public perceptions ahead of midterm elections that could alter the balance of power in Washington.
"We all understand there's more work to do if we are to fully recognize the lessons of this pandemic," said Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., who chairs the Senate's Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee and stressed the need for an independent, bipartisan approach. "When this committee started hosting briefings and hearings on covid-19, I never imagined it would become as political as it has."
Officials today are split along party lines about where to focus and what questions must be answered about the U.S. response -- even after the disease caused by the novel coronavirus has claimed nearly 1 million lives across the country and more than 9,000 people die each week.
Marked by covid, an advocacy group for people who lost loved ones to the pandemic, has spent nearly two years calling for an independent probe into the U.S. response that focuses on "lessons learned" and avoids finger-pointing, said Kristin Urquiza, the group's co-founder.
"It's about our loved ones, but it's also about something so much bigger -- what we expect from our government, how it handles itself [and] rebuilding so that we can be resilient" for the next crisis, said Urquiza, whose father died of covid-19 in June 2020. "This can't just devolve into a witch hunt of President Trump, or China, or Dr. Fauci."
The bill introduced by Murray and Sen. Richard Burr of North Carolina, the health panel's top Republican, calls for lawmakers representing both parties to choose a 12-member task force that would inquire into the nation's readiness and response to the coronavirus on the federal, state and local levels, and issue a final report and recommendations within 18 months.
The legislation cleared their panel Tuesday but still needs to receive a floor vote in both chambers of Congress before potentially becoming law.
Until now, efforts to unite Washington around such an effort have largely failed, although surveys show that many Americans have concerns about the government's response.
The House select subcommittee on the coronavirus crisis, chaired by Majority Whip James Clyburn, D-S.C., a top Biden ally, remains focused on plumbing the response under Trump, seeking new evidence of political interference and mismanagement that Democrats say allowed the virus to spread unchecked in early 2020.
In recent weeks, top Trump officials -- including former presidential adviser Scott Atlas and former Food and Drug Administration commissioner Stephen Hahn -- have privately sat for interviews with Clyburn's panel, according to committee aides. Former Centers for Disease Control and Prevention director Robert Redfield also is to speak privately with the panel.
Republicans, meanwhile, are increasingly coalescing around their own questions, such as whether the U.S. government played a role in the pandemic by funding "gain of function" research that allowed scientists to supercharge viruses in laboratories.
Last year, the U.S. intelligence community ruled out the possibility that the virus had been developed as a bioweapon by China but did not reach consensus beyond that, saying it needed China's cooperation to go further.
Scientists also say there is no hard evidence that the virus escaped from a laboratory. Many who have investigated the issue think that it spilled into the human population from animals sold in a Wuhan market.
Information for this article was contributed by Sheryl Gay Stolberg of The New York Times, by Zeke Miller and Josh Boak of The Associated Press and by Dan Diamond of The Washington Post.