This past Wednesday, just a scant few days before a shut down of the federal government, the United States House of Representatives voted and managed to get a pass on its $1.5 trillion spending bill.
This new bill freshly sported an addendum of a massive aid package for Ukraine as well as funds to allow the government to continue operating out through September, as stated by the New York Times, but there was one major change. That change was the removal of the $15.6 billion COVID-19 funding clause in the wake of massive bipartisan backlash.
The administration of President Joe Biden has previously stated that it quite urgently needed funding for vaccines, therapeutics, pandemic testing, and many other efforts to try and hold back any new COVID-19 variants, as stated by the Times.
Officials for Bidens administration, who asked for roughly $22.5 billion for their pandemic efforts, first suggested that they would require $30 billion, reported the outlet. That amount dropped even more throughout the various periods of negotiations held with Republicans.
Due to strong concerns that the entire package would end up collapsing under its own weight because of the back and forth fighting over its contents, Democrats finally announced their agreement for dropping the entire COVID-19 funding package in the bill.
“We must proceed with the omnibus today, which includes emergency funding for Ukraine and urgent funding to meet the needs of America’s families,” claimed House Speaker Nancy Pelosi as she officially announced the dropping of the COVID-19 funding clause on Wednesday. “It is heartbreaking to remove the COVID funding, and we must continue to fight for urgently needed COVID assistance, but unfortunately that will not be included in this bill.”
The bill ended up with an addition along with the dropping of the COVID-19 funding. That addition is a $13,6 billion package slated as aid for Ukraine and an increase of 5.6% in the total defense spending budget, which equates to $782 billion, raising discretionary domestic spending 6.7% to $730 billion.
Serious concerns were stated by pro-life lawmakers on Wednesday that stated that the giant omnibus spending bill would end up sending multiple millions to various abortion lobbies.
This new spending bill also slated an amount of $575 million for “family planning” on an international level, highlighted Texas Republican Rep. Chip Roy, $286 million for Title X funds to “keep the lights on at Planned Parenthood,” $32.5 million slated to go to the pro-abortion U.N. Population Fund, and a total of $200 million for an entirely new “Gender Equity and Equality Action Fund” in order to help promote abortion all across the globe.
“House Democrats are reminding us that they are religiously pro-abortion, and that they want to export their extremism everywhere,” stated Roy on Wednesday.
“Of course, this is just political payback for the abortion industry at taxpayer expense,” he continued. “The American people need to say ‘enough’ and stop funding violent tyranny over the lives of the unborn.”