During a portion of an interview with NPR released on Thursday, White House Chief of Staff Jeff Zients said that House Speaker Rep. Kevin McCarthy’s (R-CA) proposal to claw back unspent COVID relief funds as part of a package of fiscal reforms in exchange for raising the debt ceiling isn’t “a prudent thing to do or a fair thing to do” because the COVID relief money includes “funding to help transport older Americans, those with disabilities who live in rural communities.”
While speaking on “All Things Considered,” NPR White House Correspondent Asma Khalid said, “One of the things that McCarthy’s proposal calls for is to claw back unspent COVID-19 funds. And Zients was actually Biden’s COVID response coordinator before he became Chief of Staff. He told me that this is a bad idea.”
She then played a clip of Zients stating, “There is a false notion that there’s a large amount of unspent COVID relief funds that can just be painlessly clawed back, because these remaining funds, they cover pension relief for blue-collar workers, money for veterans’ health, small business support, and funding to help transport older Americans, those with disabilities who live in rural communities. So I don’t think that is a prudent thing to do or a fair thing to do.”
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