Outside of tuscaloosa, a truck caught fire, and i was there 2, 2 and a half hours, and felt like four days. sandra: the diet coke must have tasted good. i m martha: thanks very much. good afternoon. i m martha maccallum. fox news head quarters in new york. right now, breaking on the story, president biden spoke just moments ago with his covid task force. the president facing backlash over the 70-plus billion dollars in u.s. taxpayer money that was allocated to the covid relief plans supposed to make sure that there was ample testing in this country. so where did that money go? why isn t there ample testing? what about the schools and the universities? also recipients of billions of
They didn t want to pull out a policy that would reflect blame back on them. no word when the website will be open to get the at-home tests. the president saying sometime in january, not early january like he said last month. back to you, martha. martha: thanks, edward. senator roy blunt is on the health and labor and human services committee. he wrote a letter to the administration demanding answers on the money that was spent and why there s a testing shortage. he joins me now. thanks very much, senator. good to have you here. you just heard the president and what he said about this. did you get the answers that you re looking for there? no, we haven t, martha. senator burr, who has the authorizing committee, i have the appropriating committee, the top two republicans on the committees, sent a letter last week. we have about $10 billion that weren t in that adding up that what you went through.
Dollars so that they could stay open, be prepared, open safely, all of that. no many of them are saying we ll have to go virtual again. so the president criticized specifically some of the states and he s asking where did the money go? we also back then included an $10 billion for testing for schools. that money went out to the states. states and the school districts have spent the money well. many of them. unfortunately some haven t. martha: unfortunately some haven t. there s the podium. we re waiting for jen psaki that will probably get questions about this in terms of the accountability. where does the money go? if the money is supposed to be for testing and safe open schools, we don t we have that in some cases? we ll dig into that. that money was allocated for those specific things. why are we still seeing
Challenges? $72.8 billion allocated to testing and detecting the virus in an ample fashion over the course of 2020 and 2021. edward lawrence digging into this. he joins us from the white house. yeah. follow the money. this story won t go away to figure out where the money went. the frustration could be known. even here at the white house, long lines in order to get covid tests, at-home tests. very difficult to find. the president just finishing addressing his covid response and stressing that the administration pledged to buy the $500 million at-home kit to start to be delivered soon. i know this is frustrating. it s frustrating to me but we re making improvements. the last two weeks, we set up federal testing sites all over the country. we re adding more each and every
If you take all five of the bipartisan covid bills, that is about $32 billion. then about 45, 46 billion in the bill that the democrats passed by themselves this year for testing. the real question is, how is that money spent? how could we have a testing shortage now when at the end of last year we had what appeared to be a whole new series of tests coming on the market. i think my other question would be, if the federal government thinks they can buy 500 million at-home tests by the end of this month, where are those tests now? you don t have to look very hard to go to a drugstore and find out that they re out of those tests. you think if they were available, they would be on the store shelves right now rather than waiting somewhere for the federal government to buy 500 million of those tests. remember, this is 82, $83 billion that have gone into testing and they ve had all of