WASHINGTON — The Obama administration gained an important new ally Thursday in its push to get more funding to prevent an outbreak of the Zika virus — the top Senate health appropriator, Roy Blunt of Missouri.
But even as the administration’s pleas for Zika funding become more urgent, the debate could get gummed up in a broader push for funding on several other high-profile issues.
Blunt emerged from a hearing with top U.S. health officials saying that he wants Congress to pass a Zika spending bill, although the White House might not be able to get the full $1.8 billion it is requesting.
“I think it is clear that some sort of response is warranted,” he said.
Democrats, however, are already making it clear that they could try to use any Zika measure to add funding for other priorities, including the water crisis in Flint, Mich., the opioid and heroin abuse problem, and even Puerto Rico’s debt woes.
Sen. Chuck Schumer, the third-ranking Democrat in the Senate, suggested Thursday it was possible that Democrats would seek to attach funding to help Flint residents reeling from a water contamination crisis to a Zika spending measure.
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi of California was even more direct.
“My read from the speaker is that this will be bipartisan, hopefully noncontroversial as we go forward to meet the president’s request for Zika, emergency Zika funding,” Pelosi said at a press conference Thursday. “I would hope that, in tandem, that we would have an emergency supplemental for Flint, Michigan, to talk about meeting the needs of our children and families there with all the wraparound services that they need.”
Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, a New Hampshire Democrat, said that if she can’t get emergency supplemental money to fight the opioid epidemic attached to related opioid legislation, she’d consider “every opportunity” to use other measures to obtain the funds.
“Much as I am concerned about the threat of the Zika virus and I think we have to take it seriously, the fact is we are losing a person a day in New Hampshire from overdoses, thousands of people a year and we need a response to address it,” Shaheen told reporters Thursday.
Dick Durbin of Illinois, the No. 2 Democrat in the Senate, also noted that Puerto Rico, which is at risk of a Zika outbreak, needs congressional help to cope with its debt crisis.
Another huge obstacle is that conservatives in the House are likely to resist spending any additional money without finding other spending cuts to offset it.
The last two stand-alone supplemental spending bills passed by Congress were a 2014 measure that provided $235 million to Israel for a missile-defense system and a hard-fought measure that provided $60 billion in disaster relief spending after Superstorm Sandy, which was passed in January 2013.
Republicans, particularly in the House, have become more hostile to such spending requests over the past two years.