House Republicans included several provisions relating to the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic in the final appropriations bill for fiscal 2024.
Lawmakers agreed to the 1,012-page, $1 trillion minibus bill in the early morning hours on Thursday ahead of the impending government shutdown if President Joe Biden is unable to sign a bill passed by both chambers by midnight on Friday.
Here are the three top COVID-related provisions in the spending package:
Clawback of unspent COVID-19 funds
The bill claws back nearly $6.5 billion in unspent COVID-19 emergency relief funding, nearly four years after the start of the pandemic and one year following the end of the national emergency.
Specifically, the bill cuts $4.3 billion in COVID-19 funds from the Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education appropriations package, as well as $2.16 billion in the Financial Services and General Government Appropriations Act.
“House Republicans made a commitment to strategically increase defense spending, make targeted cuts to overfunded nondefense programs, and pull back wasteful spending from the previous year,” House Appropriations Committee Chairwoman Kay Granger (R-TX) said of the whole appropriations package on Thursday. “We made cuts to programs that have nothing to do with our national security and pulled back billions from the administration.”
Public health advocates have cautioned for several months that cuts to funds appropriated during the pandemic would threaten struggling health systems, hindering efforts to prevent and contain outbreaks of other infectious diseases and slowing the return to pre-pandemic levels of preventive and screening care.
Requiring greater oversight of the World Health Organization
The Republican readout of the highlights in the appropriations minibus demands “accountability at the United Nations” as part of the bill’s overall emphasis on national defense.
A provision in this section indicates that the budget requires “a report on reforms at the World Health Organization, including to regain observer status for Taiwan.”
Taiwan had limited participation in WHO affairs between 2009 and 2016 as an observer under the designation of “Chinese Taipei” but was fully removed from the organization due in part to the WHO’s relationship with the People’s Republic of China.
The Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic has been a driving force in congressional efforts for reforms to the WHO in the aftermath of the pandemic, particularly calling for the decoupling of the WHO and China.
There has been strong bipartisan support on the subcommittee for the need to increase biosafety efforts following suspicions that the coronavirus originated from a lab incident at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China.
House Republicans have uncovered evidence that the Chinese government was aware of the outbreak of the coronavirus before informing the WHO through the virus genetic material recording system managed by the National Institutes of Health.
Subcommittee Chairman Brad Wenstrup (R-OH) told the Washington Examiner in October that he hoped to “make the WHO more independent, totally free from political influence” from the United States or China.
Prohibiting funds to EcoHealth Alliance in China
The appropriations package also prohibits most government funds from going toward research conducted in China by EcoHealth Alliance, a key player in coronavirus research in Wuhan.
EcoHealth Alliance received funding from the NIH and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in the years before the outbreak of the coronavirus.
House and Senate Republicans have accused the research organization of engaging in controversial gain-of-function projects, or experimentation on viruses that increase their infectious or disease capacity.
Wenstrup told the Washington Examiner that EcoHealth Alliance had requested funding from the Department of Defense for coronavirus research projects in Wuhan and had been rejected due to the dangerousness of the project prior to obtaining the funds from NIH.
EcoHealth Alliance has told the Washington Examiner that none of its research projects involve gain-of-function research following the legal and scientific definition of the term.
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The prominent viral research organization can still obtain federal funding for research projects in China if the defense secretary grants that the research is “in the national security interests of the United States” and the funding is approved by Congress.
The bill appropriates $47 billion to the NIH, which constitutes a $300 million budget authority increase compared to fiscal 2023.