[FoxNews] Federal money is funding many items taxpayers may not expect to be included in an emergency COVID bill.But much money is going toward projects that are seemingly unrelated or barely related to the virus or the recovery from the pandemic. Technically, many such projects are permitted. But it is not how the package was sold.
"For over a year, the American people were told they were on their own. We’ve seen how hard that has been on so many Americans," Biden said at a White House appearance celebrating Senate passage of the bill in March 2021. "Everything in this package is designed to relieve the suffering and to meet the most urgent needs of the nation and put us in a better position to prevail, starting with beating this virus and vaccinating the country."
And at a White House signing ceremony six days later, Biden promised: "It’s going to require fastidious oversight to make sure there’s no waste or fraud, and the law does what it’s designed to do. And I mean it: We have to get this right."
And yet, not only is money being spent on seemingly unrelated priorities, a significant portion of the funding for local and state governments and school districts isn’t even spent yet.
Just 12% of the over $100 billion earmarked for elementary and secondary schools has been spent so far, according to federal statistics. And according to Treasury Department figures, as of the end of March 2022 only about $70 billion of the $350 billion allocated for state and local governments had been spent. Just over $100 billion of that money was contractually committed to be spent.
A Treasury spokesperson told Fox News Digital that 67% of the money available to state and local governments through March was budgeted — and likely more, due to smaller jurisdictions not reporting. The total funding available through that point was just under $225 billion. That means likely about half of the overall $350 billion had been budgeted for future use by late March.
"Washington allocated $350 billion to state and local governments to close budget deficits that did not even exist," Manhattan Institute senior fellow Brian Riedl told Fox News Digital. "These states are totally awash in more money than they know what to do with, so it's no surprise they haven't allocated yet – they're going to be sitting on this money for years."
"That's the kind of thing that we should be exactly 0% surprised by," R Street Institute senior fellow Jonathan Bydlak said. "Any time you have that much money flowing out of Washington, frankly without any real strings or oversight… you're going to get these cases."
Riedl said part of the reason for some of the apparent waste is that the cash was sent to the state and local governments in a one-time lump sum. When that's the case, he said, "state and local governments will look for one-time expenditures, and that can often be silly purchases or silly advertising campaigns."
While money for schools and state and local governments has been slow to spend, the federal government for its part has doled out nearly all the money it was obligated to spend under the American Rescue Plan. Among those expenditures hundreds of billions on stimulus checks and unemployment insurance.
Money spent on a variety of tax credits, including the child tax credit, and the expansion of the Affordable Care Act through 2022 also is almost completely gone.
But Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget senior vice president and senior policy director Marc Goldwein said that spending is causing its own problems.
"It's bad if the money isn't spent, and bad if it is," he told Fox News Digital.
If it's been spent, according to Goldwein, "it's worsening the inflation crisis." If it hasn't, he said, it goes against the "goal of the bill" as an emergency measure.
Gene Sperling, a senior adviser to the president and American Rescue Plan coordinator, said that despite just 12% of ARPA funds being officially spent, according to government numbers, a significant majority had already been committed to be spent by school districts. Sperling also said the passage of the ARPA funding lit a fire under school districts and motivated them to spend other COVID-related federal money they'd not yet allocated "ten times" faster.