Van Drew: We Need to Claw Back COVID Money, It’s Being Spent on SUVs for Officials

On Friday’s broadcast of the Fox Business Network’s “Mornings with Maria,” Rep. Jeff Van Drew (R-NJ) called for clawing back unspent COVID money as part of raising the debt ceiling and pointed to New Jersey using COVID funds for SUVs to transport state officials as an example of COVID money being misused and why it should be clawed back.

Van Drew said, “We’re willing to negotiate, to discuss. We have a good bill. We have a bill where we make cuts, where we have a responsible — and that’s an important word — debt ceiling where we’re willing to go back to spending — 1% increase a year, go back to the ’22 budget, because it was so bloated anyhow because of all the COVID stuff in it. And there [are] lots of ways to save money in there, starting with the 80-some thousand IRS agents that we don’t need, to clawing back on the COVID dollars themselves to make sure they’re used for the stuff they should be used for right now to save money and keep our budget going. In New Jersey — I’ll just give you one example, as you know, I’m from New Jersey — our governor used it to buy a whole fleet of SUVs, fancy new SUVs. Let’s give the taxpayer a break. People are breaking their back working and their money is worth less and they’re working harder, and it’s the same with businesses and we have bad inflation, and we have an administration that just doesn’t care.”

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