Federal officials estimate that local governments now have spending plans in place for most of the money they received under a prominent pandemic relief law.
In some cases, it's hard to know exactly how the money is being used, because some governments haven't supplied details about their projects.
Joplin, for example, plans to spend its pandemic aid on housing projects, high-speed internet, streets, a bicycle park, public safety equipment and more. The City Council approved the plan last month. But it won't show up on federal reports until October., took a deliberate approach with its pandemic aid to develop"really transformational projects,” said Leslie Haase, the city's finance director.
As of their April reports, more 26,500 governments collectively had spent 43% of their funds and approved plans for spending 77% of the money, according to the AP's analysis. “Although the Left claimed their $2 trillion bill was designed to fight COVID, they wasted hundreds of billions of Americans’ hard-earned tax dollars on ridiculous things,” Republican U.S. Rep. Jason Smith, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, said in a statement to the AP.
Yet the federal aid helped the city to construct sidewalks, replace computer software, upgrade the police radio system and make fire and safety improvements to a civic center, among other things, said Lakewood Chief Financial Officer Holly Bjorklund. Counting the federal money as replacement funding for government services shouldn't relieve local officials of describing what they did with it — even if it just went toward salaries or office supplies, said Sean Moulton, senior policy analyst at the nonprofit Project on Government Oversight.
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