Washington Post Fact Checker Gives AOC Three Pinocchios On Claim Trump Didn’t Allocate Funds to Fight Opioid Crisis
The Washington Post fact checker gave Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) three pinocchios on Tuesday for her misleading claim that President Donald Trump did not give any money to address the nation’s opioid epidemic.
In her tweet, Ocasio-Cortez criticized Trump for diverting money towards a border wall, but noting “to address the Opioid National Emergency”:
?Amount President Trump has transferred from other agencies to fund his ‘Build the Wall’ Emergency: $10s of millions, & has identified billions more.
? Amount he’s transferred to address the Opioid National Emergency: $0 https://t.co/KamONSr67q
— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) March 8, 2019
The Post’s Glenn Kessler writes Ocasio-Cortez is comparing two different scenarios that have had different outcomes. Since Congress did not approve a budget for more border walls, Trump has decided to declare a national emergency with funds to come from the Department of Defense.
In the case of the opioid crisis, Trump declared a “nationwide public health emergency,” which enabled the Department of Health and Human Services to redirect funds. Likewise, Congress has also appropriated more money for the crisis:
After the declaration, Congress appropriated more than $6 billion to combat the opioid crisis, including $4.4 billion in the fiscal 2019 spending bill. The bill included $1.5 billion in state response grants, $500 million for research, $475.6 million for prescription drug overdose prevention, $120 million for rural communities and $89 million for medication-assisted treatment for addiction; it also gave the director of the National Institutes of Health the ability to transfer funds “specifically appropriated for opioid addiction, opioid alternatives, pain management, and addiction treatment.”
“In other words, the situations are not comparable,” Kessler writes. “Trump wanted almost $6 billion for his wall, which Congress refused. But Congress acted to give the administration more than $6 billion for the opioid crisis, so there was little need for him to transfer funds without congressional authorization.”
The only reason why the Post did not give Ocasio-Cortez a full, four pinocchios, is due to her being correct in the “most narrow technical way,” but it’s based on “red herrings and false equivalency.”
