Congress is moving this week to dismiss a proposed cut to spending on the Pentagon biosecurity program that discovered the coronavirus outside China and that is now the subject of Russian propaganda about Ukraine.
The defense section of the federal spending package that the Senate is expected to clear as early as Thursday night would allocate $229 million for the Biological Threat Reduction Program in fiscal 2022, just above the current $225 million level of spending — instead of the 45 percent cut the Biden administration had proposed.
The program helps some 30 countries prevent, detect and respond to outbreaks of disease or use of biological weapons. In January 2020, a lab in Thailand that received money from the Defense Department program was the first to find that the coronavirus had migrated outside China.
