To win Republican support, Senate negotiators promised that a bipartisan COVID-19 aid package would be fully paid for with cuts to previous pandemic relief programs that had money left over.
But the single biggest offset in the compromise legislation — $2.3 billion in savings from the vastly undersubscribed “aviation manufacturing jobs protection program” in last year’s pandemic aid package — is money that was never going to be spent anyway. So, in reality, it’s just a phantom offset that leaves the bill partially unpaid for, budget experts say.
The crux of the issue is that the Congressional Budget Office is still working off last summer’s “baseline” for measuring the cost of legislative changes, with its updated forecast on hold until May.
