Concurrent Resolution on the Budget for Fiscal Year 2021

Floor Speech

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Ms. ESHOO. Mr. Speaker, the Budget Resolution before the House is the first step toward providing urgently needed relief for the American people, as our Nation struggles to address the COVID-19 pandemic and its impact on our economy.

The need for Congress to act is both great and urgent. We're in a race against death, with over 450,000 fellow Americans lost to COVID- 19. Our failure to defeat the virus has dragged our economy down, with more than 18 million Americans currently unemployed and scheduled to lose their unemployment insurance in six weeks if Congress does not act.

House Concurrent Resolution 11 allows Congress to quickly pass a bold $1.9 trillion relief bill to defeat the virus, support workers and small businesses, and help families until the economy can reopen. President Biden's American Rescue Plan includes $20 billion for a national vaccination strategy to increase supply and vaccination sites; $50 billion to scale up testing through the purchasing of rapid tests and expanded lab capacity; and $3 billion in innovative COVID-19 treatments. While we have effective vaccines to prevent people from getting COVID-19, we do not yet have accessible medicines to treat people who are sick with the disease. This plan funds research and large-scale clinical trials needed to develop therapeutics such as antivirals and antibodies to help people recover from COVID-19. The American Rescue Plan will also extend increased unemployment insurance for laid-off workers and provide resources for state and local governments to preserve the jobs of essential public workers fighting on the frontlines against this pandemic. These are the right policies at the right time.

House Concurrent Resolution 11, the Budget Resolution for Fiscal Year 2021, allows Congress to provide pandemic relief through reconciliation, a procedure that allows the Senate to bypass the filibuster and pass this legislation with a simple majority vote. The American people simply want Congress to help them survive this pandemic and defeat the virus. This resolution is a major step in making good on our promise to provide bold, urgent, and necessary support to those who have been hit the hardest by the pandemic and to address our cascading economy, and I urge my colleagues to support it.

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