Big-Government Contagion: Appropriators throw hundreds of billions at the virus—and at everything else

By Kimberley A. Strassel. Excerpts:

"More concerning is the extent to which Democrats used the bill to tighten every fiber of the social safety net. Put aside the $260 billion for unemployment benefits, potentially necessary in light of record jobless claims. The bill throws $25 billion more at food stamps and child nutrition; $12 billion at housing; $3.5 billion to states for child care; $32 billion at education; $900 million at low-income heating assistance; $50 million at legal services for the poor and so on. This is a massive expansion of the welfare state, seemingly with no regard to the actual length of this crisis.

There’s also the money appropriators threw at government for no purpose other than the throwing. Every outpost gets dollars, most for nothing more than the general command “to prevent, prepare for, and respond to coronavirus.” NASA gets $60 million. Has the virus infected the sun’s corona? The National Archives gets $8 million. Will it put the virus on display? Many departments get cash for research, regardless of their relevance to today’s medical crisis. Perhaps the Energy Department will use its additional $99 million in “science” to gauge how the virus responds in a nuclear reactor.

Then there’s the outright pork. The Forest Service gets $3 million for “forest and rangeland research,” $27 million for “capital improvement and maintenance,” and $7 million for wildfire management. The bill shovels $75 million to the National Foundation on the Arts and the Humanities, $25 million to the Kennedy Center, an odd $78,000 “payment” to the Institute of American Indian and Alaska Native Culture and Arts Development. A water project in central Utah gets $500,000. Appropriators can sneak a lot into 880 pages.

The bill sends $150 billion to state governments, on top of the dollars for unemployment, health care and education. Some of this money will be used to backstop local governments struggling with virus response, or with the economic consequences of the shutdown. But for all the Democratic demands of oversight on the bill’s business loans, the state dollars have no real strings attached. Should a locality choose to use its dollars to create new nonsensical business regulations, so be it."

"The bill’s real failure is that it makes no distinctions between temporary and permanent expansion of government. The state has a role in short-term crises, and lawmakers have an obligation to allocate the resources to respond. But Democrats successfully exploited the crisis to expand the power of government overall—perhaps for the long term. That’s especially perverse, given it was government that imposed the restrictions that shut down the economy, necessitating this rescue bill in the first place."