White House Budget Director Shalanda Young on Friday asked Congress to provide $4 billion to, among other things, rebuild the collapsed bridge in Baltimore and advocated for increased resources on the border with Mexico.
“Congress has yet to respond to the additional urgent requests the President made last October that would strengthen border security and address urgent national needs,” Shalanda Young wrote in a letter to Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson.
The American Congress adopted in April, after months of extremely tense negotiations, a $95 billion aid plan, which notably included a gigantic package of military and economic assistance for Ukraine.
“I am writing today to reiterate the October request and submit revised estimates of an additional $4 billion,” the director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) said in the letter.
It includes rebuilding the bridge that collapsed in March after being hit by a container ship at the entrance to the port of Baltimore in Maryland, repairs in Hawaii after wildfires ravaged the island of Maui last summer, and assistance after tornadoes in the Midwest.
In addition to the $4 billion, Shalanda Young called on Congress to support the bipartisan “border security” deal, which would “provide significant policy changes, resources and personnel needed to secure U.S. Borders and Fixing the Broken Immigration System.”
The White House accuses Republicans of blocking any migration reform in Congress, at the request of Donald Trump. The US Senate rejected at the end of May a bill aimed at strengthening controls on the southern border with Mexico after an initial failure in February.
The leader of the Republicans in the Senate Mitch McConnell, who had nevertheless helped negotiate the text, had considered that the Democrats’ decision to submit it again to the vote was nothing other than a “scheme” before the elections.
The White House budget director finally urged elected officials in Congress to act in the face of “the precarious state of the early childhood sector,” and insisted on “the need to reduce child care costs for working families.