The Democrats' gigantic waste of money

It's impossible to read this bill without getting mightily upset. In Subtitle E--Testing, SEC. 2401, it says "In General.--In addition to amounts otherwise available, there is appropriated to the Secretary of Health and Human Services (in this subtitle referred to as the "Secretary") for fiscal year 2021, out of any money in the Treasury not otherwise appropriated, $47,800,000,000, to remain available until expended, to carry out activities to detect, diagnose, trace, and monitor SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19 infections and related strategies to mitigate the spread of COVID-19."

In short, Sec. 2401 instructs the administration to put together a plan "to detect, diagnose, trace, and monitor SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19 infections and related strategies to mitigate the spread of COVID-19." To execute the creation of that plan, Congress appropriated "$47,800,000,000." (That's $47.8B.)

In light of this information, the first question that must be asked is 'What did we get for that $47,800,000,000?' In light of this weekend's Vanity Fair article, one thing we know that we didn't get was a testing plan. Let's review what the Vanity Fair article said:

On October 22, a group of COVID-19 testing experts joined a Zoom call with officials from the Biden administration and presented a strategy for overhauling America’s approach to testing.

The 10-page plan, which Vanity Fair has obtained, would enable the U.S. to finally do what many other countries had already done: Put rapid at-home COVID-19 testing into the hands of average citizens, allowing them to screen themselves in real time and thereby help reduce transmission. The plan called for an estimated 732 million tests per month, a number that would require a major ramp-up of manufacturing capacity. It also recommended, right on the first page, a nationwide "Testing Surge to Prevent Holiday COVID Surge."

How can this happen, especially in light that Congress had just appropriated $50 B to build a testing plan. In the first minute of this video, Mr. Biden said that we didn't have any over-the-counter testing kits:

That might or might not be true. What's indisputable is that parking lots at CVS, Walgreens and Walmart were turned into pop-up testing sites. Those sites didn't take months of pondering the positives and negatives. Then-President Trump reached out to the CEOs of these companies and persuaded them to help out. The sites were up-and-running in no time.

That's what leaders do. They act decisively without fear of making a mistake. These are the times when the perfect is the enemy of the good. That's when it's important to get something functional running before moving on to perfecting that system.