The House majority is significant enough that the infrastructure bill passed without many in the GOP voting in favor of it. $1 trillion has been approved, which means that a lot of money is going to be spent to make updates to the country’s infrastructure.
There’s just one problem…how is it going to be spent?
This is where the House GOP is voicing their concerns. It’s important to be good financial stewards with this kind of money. The liberals can’t simply spend it wherever they see fit. It has to be spent in ways that make the most sense.
Although this should have been established before the bill passed, Pelosi didn’t really want to discuss anything about the spending. She just wanted to shove the legislation down everyone’s throats. So, now, it is up to the GOP to help address some of the concerns and make sure that everything is getting properly approved.
Republicans throughout the House are concerned with fraud, so they’re urging the inspectors general to create plans that will ensure that the funds within the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act are distributed with caution.
It’s no wonder why the House GOP has cause for concern. Republicans have cited a significant amount of fraud when it comes to the COVID-19 relief programs.
Republicans wrote, “As much as $400 billion, or half of the unemployment claims, could be fraudulent.”
Countless stories hit the news about how there were false claims and how many of the Paycheck Protection Program funds were hit by criminals. The Department of Justice has already charged more than 100 people with fraud, which also led Attorney General Merrick Garland to establish a task force to identify further issues of fraud associated with the COVID and other government programs.
Ohio Representative Bob Gibbs told the Daily Caller “It’s no secret the government has a history of mismanaging grant and loan programs.” He went on to say that the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act is “filled to the brim with grant programs ripe for bad actors to exploit and incompetent bureaucrats to mismanage.”
With all that being said, there has to be something done to prevent such a high level of fraud. $1 trillion cannot simply be flushed down the drain because the liberals wanted to trust each and every American who applied for a grant.
Gibbs went on to say that the Republicans are demanding to know how the inspectors general will work to prevent mismanagement and corruption. After all, taxpayers deserve to know how this kind of money is being spent. He wanted to make sure that “another Solyndra-style corruption scandal” doesn’t occur.
It’s hard to argue with such a request. As much as Pelosi and the rest of the House liberals hate to agree with anything suggested by the GOP, failure to agree to such a thing would mean that they had intentions of allowing corruption.
It’s entirely possible that the infrastructure bill was going to be used as a way to make sure that certain states got funding for programs that were absolutely ridiculous. However, we can at least hope that the spending is overseen as promised so that we don’t have to worry about corruption and mismanagement of the funds.