U.S. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy has reversed course and announced that $300 million in aid to Ukraine will be included in the Department of Defense appropriation bill headed to the House floor.
“House Speaker Kevin McCarthy changed course on a decision to pull $300 million in Ukraine funding from the defense spending bill, and expects to lose some votes because of it.
Mr. McCarthy, California Republican, said on Friday that he would pull the funding from the Department of Defense spending bill and put the matter up for a vote separately.
The move was meant to earn support from conservative holdouts that sank a second procedural vote on the defense legislation earlier in the week. But on Saturday, the speaker said that the plan was not going to work.
The issue stems from the other bills in the package that GOP lawmakers are putting with the defense spending measure in an attempt to advance at least a few pieces of spending legislation before the September 30th deadline.
Those other measures include spending bills for defense, the Department of Homeland Security, State and Foreign Operations and the USDA. Lawmakers on the House Rules Committee worked over the weekend to hammer out what Mr. McCarthy called a minibus-style rule for the package of bills.
The main problem was that the State and Foreign Ops bill also had Ukraine funding, which made taking out Ukraine funding in the defense bill ‘more difficult to do’, Mr. McCarthy said”. -Alex Miller, Washington Times
As the Russo-Ukrainian war drags into its nineteenth month, the United States remains far and away Kiev's biggest single benefactor.
According to the Kiel Institute's Ukraine Support Tracker, which quantifies military and financial aid given to Ukraine since January 24th, 2022, if the $24 billion package gets approved by Congress, the United States total aid to Kiev will begin closing in on one hundred billion dollars.