Trump Wants to Take Away Heat From the Poor to Fund Coronavirus Response

Donald Trump’s response to the coronavirus has been, to date, typically Trumpian, which is to say: incoherent, disorganized, full of lies, and reminiscent, we assume, of that sinking feeling one gets after having unprotected sex with a porn star. Earlier this week, the president claimed that “we are very close to a vaccine,” a statement that has no basis in fact. On the same day, he threw it out there that there were only 10 confirmed cases in the United States, despite the fact that, at the time, there were more than five times that. On the same day that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention told Americans an outbreak is a certainty, he insisted the whole thing is under control, which presumably had something to do with the fact that he doesn’t want to scare the stock market, one of the only things he cares about. And, this is all on top of a report last month that the administration has “intentionally rendered itself incapable” of dealing with problems of this magnitude, having wiped out its “entire pandemic response chain of command, including the White House management infrastructure” and shutting down both the National Security Council’s global health security team and its counterpart at the Department of Homeland Security.

Having realized that maybe it looks bad to not even ask Congress for some money to deal with the crisis, on Monday the White House requested $2.5 billion to address the outbreak, funds that would go toward vaccines, treatment, and protective equipment. The figure was immediately slammed by Democrats as insufficient, and that was seemingly before they read the fine print on how the administration would like to partially pay for the funding, i.e. letting poor people freeze in the middle of winter. Per the Washington Post:

House Democrats tell us they are outraged by one aspect of the White House response in particular: The White House appears to have informed Democrats that they want to fund the emergency response in part by taking money from a program that funds low-income home heating assistance. A document that the Trump administration sent to Congress, which we have seen, indicates that the administration is transferring $37 million to emergency funding for the coronavirus response from the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program, or LIHEAP, which funds heating for poor families.

Democrats see this as provoking budgetary bickering and unnecessary political friction at a time when a clean emergency appropriation could easily avoid both. “After dithering for weeks as the coronavirus spread around the world, the Trump administration has now decided to pay for its belated response by cutting funding for heating assistance for low-income families,” Evan Hollander, a spokesman for House Appropriations Committee Democrats, told us in a statement. While budgetary disputes are commonplace, in this case an important principle is at stake. A situation like this could ideally be handled with a clean, new emergency funding bill, making this sort of battling—which could slow the response to the crisis—entirely unnecessary.