Some pandemic relief money has funded controversial liberal priorities that far fall outside the bounds of what most would consider COVID-19 recovery.
The latest example occurred last week in New Hampshire, where a school district near Manchester used COVID-19 relief funding to pay for a Pride event that was scheduled to include drag performances for children.
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But across the country, local and federal officials have poured money that lawmakers insisted was necessary to prevent an economic disaster into projects that are wasteful, ineffective, or, in many cases, fronts in the culture wars.
The New Hampshire school used $4,000 in American Rescue Plan Act money to fund the Pride event, according to the NH Journal.
In Utah, state education officials used pandemic funding to produce a video that encouraged teachers to introduce “gender play” and explorations of gender identities to their classrooms. The video sparked outrage among parents and other state officials when its contents, as well as the fact that CARES Act funding paid for it, surfaced in February.
Some schools have used pandemic funding to build gender-neutral bathrooms to accommodate transgender students, such as a middle school in Maine that planned to use $32,000 of American Rescue Plan Act money for gender-neutral bathrooms and another Maine school that planned to use some of the $161,000 in funding it got from the American Rescue Plan Act for gender-neutral bathrooms.
Many schools spent pandemic relief funds on the implementation of critical race theory curricula or on putting teachers through progressive “equity” training.
Massachusetts’s plan for spending its $1.8 billion in American Rescue Plan money, for example, identified “engaging in robust agency-wide anti-racism training and development of an equity planning tool” as a top need for state schools.
Oregon’s plan for spending the $1 billion it got in American Rescue Plan funding involved “an equity-informed, anti-racist, and anti-oppressive lens [that] weaves throughout all of the response strategies.” Its guidelines for reopening schools with federal funding included asking teachers to boost “LGBTQ2SIA+ focused groups,” “mitigate risks for immigrant students and families who may be undocumented,” and “provide counter narratives to biased representations of race, culture, gender.”
The guidelines recommended teachers counter “national myths like ‘America is the land of opportunity.’”
The Minneapolis Public School District set aside some of its recovery money for “anti-bias curriculum purchases” for kindergarten through eighth grade classrooms. Its plan for spending COVID-19 recovery money included giving teachers three extra days during the summer for “equity training.”
The federal government also put pandemic relief money toward progressive cultural causes through the National Endowment of the Arts.
The National Endowment of the Arts offered multiple rounds of grants to help artistic organizations keep their doors open during the pandemic after receiving $75 million from the CARES Act and $135 million from the American Rescue Plan Act.
The Center for Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Art & Culture, an organization that also goes by Queer Cultural Center, received $150,000 from the American Rescue Plan. The San Francisco group’s next event is a book reading night titled “Black Faggotry,” according to the center’s website, and it has hosted drag story hour for children since receiving the federal money.
The GLBT Historical Society — a gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender museum and archival organization — received $200,000 from the American Rescue Plan through the National Endowment for the Humanities, according to USA Spending. The group is holding a drag story hour for families next week.
Another San Francisco organization, Fresh Meat Productions, received a $150,000 grant from the American Rescue Plan through the NEA for transgender dance programs, which include a drag dance lesson billed for “all ages.”
The Department of Health and Human Services put nearly $1.2 million of funding from the American Rescue Plan toward a program in Denver that, among other things, aimed to distribute hundreds of “safer-injection kits” that included “bleach, cotton, information about how to inject safely and clean [intravenous drug use] paraphernalia.”
The money was also set to go toward “a public communication campaign that reduces the stigma of substance use” and to promote “harm-reduction” efforts rather than anti-drug efforts.
A Planned Parenthood clinic in New York, according to USA Spending, received nearly $1.2 million in pandemic funding. The money was to expand the drug abuse portion of its services in the state, but critics of the abortion provider argue any federal funding given to Planned Parenthood can help support its abortion services because it frees up more of the organization’s budget for the procedure.
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Much of the COVID-19 recovery spending is difficult to track, however.
While the federal government distributed some directly through grants and other programs, much of the money went to states, local governments, and school districts where officials had broad authority to determine how they would spend the funding.
