Whatever the Trump administration did with the massive sums of money being spent on COVID has to be looked at very carefully. And it’s not because they shouldn’t have spent it. It’s who benefitted from it.
Check this out:
The Trump administration quietly took around $10 billion from a fund meant to help hospitals and health care providers affected by Covid-19 and used the money to bankroll Operation Warp Speed contracts, four former Trump administration officials told STAT.
The Department of Health and Human Services appears to have used a financial maneuver that allowed officials to spend the money without telling Congress, and the agency got permission from its top lawyer to do so. Now, the Biden administration is refusing to say whether the outlay means there will be less money available for hospitals, physicians, nursing homes, and other providers.
Several provider groups said they had not heard that $10 billion for providers was spent on Warp Speed contracts until STAT’s reporting. Congress set aside that money to help health care providers pay for pandemic-related expenses including staffing, personal protective equipment, care for uninsured patients, and vaccine distribution. One of the top hospital lobbyists in D.C., who also did not know about the outlay, emphasized how much some hospitals still need the funding.
“Hospitals in need of the funding would be outraged to know that some of the money was siphoned off, even for important uses, because Congress was clear that this money was for providers and clinicians,” said Chip Kahn, CEO of the Federation of American Hospitals.
Former White House budget office director Russ Vought, one of the key officials involved in the deliberations, defended the decision. He told STAT the expenditure was necessary to support the successful development and purchase of Covid-19 vaccines and therapeutics.
“We had to draw from the Provider Relief Fund and had the authority to do so. It was the right thing to do in order to move as quickly as possible because lives were on the line. Thankfully we did. We would do it again,” Vought said in an email.The Operation Warp Speed program was created by the Trump administration, not Congress, so officials pulled funding from existing pools of money. But by late summer last year, the Warp Speed accounts were running dry, a former senior HHS official said.
Nobody would have denied Operation Warp Speed the money it needed. But the idea that they would surreptitiously take money from other needed programs instead of going to congress says everything. They just could not do anything right.
And now these Republicans are refusing to vote for the COVID relief plan because they are just as bad as the Trump administration.
By the way, that monster Vought is going to hell. He was one of the worst.