Obama Chides Congress Over Zika Funding

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/24/us/politics/obama-chides-congress-over-zika-funding.html

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The House and Senate are gearing up for a push before a Memorial Day break that President Obama said Congress should not take unless it got some very specific business done.

Mr. Obama chided lawmakers last week, saying they should not leave town at the end of this week unless they reconcile their differences over a Zika prevention funding bill and send him public health legislation he is willing to sign.

“They should not be going off on recess before this is done,” Mr. Obama said about putting resources behind an effort to stop the spread of the mosquito-borne virus. “To the extent that we’re not handling this thing on the front end, we’re going to have bigger problems on the back end.”

But chances of a quick compromise on the legislation seem dim. The House has provided only about half as much as the $1.1 billion approved by the Senate — both well short of the $1.9 billion sought by the White House. And the House bill would shift money to fight Zika from efforts to combat Ebola, which Mr. Obama compared to robbing Peter to pay Paul.

The president also archly referred to aggressive Republican efforts in fall 2014 to make the administration’s response to the Ebola outbreak a major campaign issue.

“Given that I have, at least, pretty vivid memories of how concerned people were about Ebola, the notion that we would stop monitoring as effectively and dealing with Ebola in order to deal with Zika doesn’t make a lot of sense,” he said.

Pressuring lawmakers over recess is a tried-and-true tactic of both parties who find it helpful to remind voters that officials are heading off on a holiday with important business left undone — often business more important to one party than the other. But the president’s complaint is likely to have little impact on the congressional schedule. With legislative time for the year already starting to run short, the House and the Senate are trying to finish other business this week, including the first significant overhaul in decades of legislation governing regulation of toxic chemicals, including many found in household items.