On margin, I think it’s great that we’re unwinding COVID spending. It was a miracle there was actually support for very big investments during COVID to keep people above water, but that support was tenuous and may not have been present with a democrat in office.

Allowing pandemic and emergency spending to go away is critical to ensuring we can keep doing emergency investments when necessary in the future.

Imagine how much worse COVID would have been for people’s families and lives if every single step along the way (even more than it felt like this was true), the GOP would have been fighting that if they give this relief now, it’ll never go away.

Crisis spending is meant to help resolve the crisis. And while we continue to live with a new, frightening disease, we are no longer in the crisis we were in before.

On matters like student debt relief, the child tax credit, supplemental spending in education and at child care centers, the crisis funding should stop.

We can argue for each (or all) of those supports as a part of our permanent social safety net, but we should not be fighting for them as part of COVID or the crisis that was.

Here’s the thing– politically, this additional spending does not have the support it needs to be sustained. Fight for that, don’t try and win on fragile technicalities or twist a quick response system into permanence.