White House Blames Democrat-controlled Congress for PPE, Testing Shortages

The White House blamed the Democrat-controlled Congress on Tuesday for shortages of COVID-19 testing and personal protective equipment (PPE) ahead of an anticipated surge in coronavirus cases this winter.

Dr. Ashish Jha, the Biden administration’s COVID-19 coordinator, told reporters in the White House on Tuesday that Congress had failed to “do its job” on COVID-19 funding:

Yeah, so we — we mentioned there were two areas where we were not going to have the stockpiles that we wanted to have going into the winter: PPE and testing. Both essential parts of a COVID response.

But when Congress fails to do its job, we have to make some extremely difficult choices. We made the choice we wanted to make sure people had the — we had enough vaccines for Americans. We wanted to make sure we had enough treatments for Americans. And that necessarily meant that we went into this winter without adequate stockpiles of either PPE or tests. That remains true today.

And, you know, the last point I will make about this is that, in my mind, it’s unacceptable that Congress is forcing us to make these choices for the American people. The American people deserve a COVID response that doesn’t trade off between tests and PPE on one hand and treatments and vaccines on the other. They deserve a COVID response that allows us to have all of those things. And unfortunately, that is not where Congress has landed on this.

Both houses of Congress are controlled by Democrats. The White House seemed to suggest that Republican opposition was to blame for Congress’s reluctance to pass new COVID-19 funding, but Democrats have been able to push through other bills, such as the so-called Inflation Reduction Act, on strict party lines using the “reconciliation” process that bypasses the filibuster in the Senate.

Joe Biden and the Democrats attacked then-President Donald Trump in 2020 when the country encountered the pandemic without sufficient testing and PPE stockpiles. President Trump activated the Defense Production Act to provide the needed supplies.

While promising to do a better job on the pandemic, the Biden administration has presided over more COVID-19 deaths than the Trump administration, despite the presence of vaccines, which were fast-tracked under Trump, over Biden’s skeptical objections.