Roy Blunt: “I am pleased to be here today to talk about the 2021 appropriations bill that we filed this week for Labor, for Health…”

“I am pleased to be here today to talk about the 2021 appropriations bill that we filed this week for Labor, for Health and Human Services, and for Education. Obviously, with what we have gone through this year, those three agencies have all experienced dramatic challenges--labor challenges, health challenges, education challenges. And while this bill would not specifically be a COVID relief bill, it is a bill that funds these agencies so they can move forward with their normal work rather than have to, in some piecemeal way, try to deal with their normal work while they are trying to work with us on the extraordinary circumstances of the COVID bill. This is the largest bill--Labor, Health, and Education is the largest nondefense bill on the discretionary side of the agenda. It is about 30 percent of all the money left when the Defense appropriations is taken off the table. There are 11 bills left at that point, but this bill has about 30 percent of all the money. It has a lot of competing priorities, from apprenticeships to biomedical research, to public health and preparedness programs, to childcare and special education. National service and community service are all in this bill. We received 8,352 requests from Senators of things they would like to see in the bill. They are not all in there, but we did all we could to take the money we had and move forward with priorities that make sense.…”