The White House is trying to block billions of dollars for coronavirus testing and contact tracing in the upcoming stimulus relief bill, two Republican sources told NBC News, even as infections surge across the country and Americans face long wait times to receive test results amid high demand, CNBC reported.
Senate GOP lawmakers, in a break with the administration, are pushing back and trying to keep the money for testing and tracing in the bill, the sources told NBC News. Some White House officials reportedly believe new money shouldn’t be allocated for testing because previous funds remain unspent.
The Trump administration also wants to block billions of dollars that would go toward bolstering the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Pentagon and the State Department to combat the pandemic, The Post reported Saturday, citing people familiar with the deliberations.
While moving to block testing assistance, the Trump administration is trying to use the legislation to fund priorities unrelated to the pandemic such as a new FBI building, according to the Post.
The White House effort to block funding for testing comes after the administration relied on overly optimistic models which suggested the U.S. moved past the peak of the outbreak in the spring, according to a report in The New York Times. As a result, the administration pushed to reopen the economy and shifted responsibility for responding to the pandemic from the federal government to the states with disastrous results, according to the Times.
President Trump has called coronavirus testing a “double-edged sword” and suggested at a campaign rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma that officials should slow testing down. White House officials later said Trump was joking.
The Times’ report portrayed a president who feels trapped politically because cases counts inevitably increase as more people are tested, jeopardizing the reopening of the economy and damaging his re-election chances.
Trump, when confronted with a chart showing surging infections, dismissed the data in a Fox News interview, telling anchor Chris Wallace that if the nation tested less there would be fewer cases. The U.S. hit a record 77,225 new cases on July 16, according to data from Johns Hopkins University.
“Chris, that’s because we have great testing, because we have the best testing in the world,” Trump told Wallace. “If we didn’t test, you wouldn’t be able to show that chart. If we tested half as much, those numbers would be down.”
“Well, cases are up — many of those cases shouldn’t even be cases,” the President said. “Cases are up because we have the best testing in the world and we have the most testing.”
Trump said many infected people “automatically” recover from the virus. Health officials have repeatedly pointed out that new cases have outpaced the increase in testing, which indicates that the virus is spreading rapidly in communities across the country.
Be the first to comment