Why We Are Covid Broke

All Washington knows how to do is spend money—and it can’t even do that well.

Kimberley Strassel. Excerpts:

"We are, somehow, Covid broke. How? Didn’t Washington, under the cry of “emergency,” spend $6.6 trillion in fiscal 2020 and $6.8 trillion more in 2021? Both years equaled at least 50% more in spending than in 2019—and all for “Covid.” Only a year ago, Democrats waved through a sixth Covid relief bill, President Biden’s massive $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan—enough money to buy every Covid vaccine, ventilator, and hospital chain on the planet. Only this week, the White House put out a $5.8 trillion 2023 budget proposal. Yet the administration insists that without $22.5 billion in emergency dollars now, we again face Covid apocalypse.

Where did all the money go? Everywhere but to Covid. The Rescue Plan handed $350 billion in “relief” money to the states, and the Associated Press recently described its uses. Some $140 million is going to a high-end hotel in Broward County, Fla. Colorado Springs, Colo., is dumping $6.6 million into golf-course irrigation systems. An Iowa county is using $2 million to purchase a privately owned ski area. Massachusetts is ladling $5 million to cover the debts of the Edward M. Kennedy Institute for the U.S. Senate.

Crain’s reports that even dollars earmarked for Covid aren’t safe. New York is sitting on funds that were supposed to go to homeowner assistance and small-business recovery but may not be needed as the pandemic wanes. Crain’s notes that “one watchdog raised the notion that the relief money—particularly $12.7 billion in American Rescue Plan Act funds—could become a pile of unassigned dollars for the state government to use as it deems necessary.”

And that’s just the legal waste, fraud and abuse. One of Congress’s first Covid-relief bills created a committee of inspectors general to provide oversight of Covid funds. It’s done a good job—even as Congress studiously ignores its findings. The inspector general of the Small Business Administration reported that fraud in the Paycheck Protection Program and other loans was “unheard of—unprecedented.” “In terms of the monetary value, the amount of fraud in these Covid relief programs is going to be larger than any government program that came before it,” he told ABC News in August.

The Labor Department inspector general now estimates that more than $163 billion of $872 billion in Covid unemployment dollars might have been improperly paid, “with a significant portion attributable to fraud.” That’s a 19% improper-payment rate and more than seven times the $22.5 billion the White House recently insisted it needed in emergency additional Covid dollars."