When the federal government distributed $350 billion to states and localities as part of a 2022 pandemic aid bill, the rules were clear: find ways to spend the money by the end of 2024 or it would recouped by the feds.
But the Biden administration quietly changed those rules in late 2023 to give state and local governments more time to spend their American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) funds. Critics say it's a change that could transform an already wasteful and unnecessary bailout into an open-ended slush fund for those governments.
