Conservatives Divided Over Biden's $40.1 Billion for Ukraine

A group of conservatives on Tuesday called for for Congress to reject President Joe Biden's latest aid package to Ukraine — which totals $40.1 billion.

In a Tuesday letter from The Heritage Foundation and other fiscal conservative group leaders to House and Senate leaders of both parties, Punchbowl News reported, the influential leaders urged restraint.

"We, the undersigned organizations representing millions of hard working Americans and their families around the country, urge you to reject the Biden administration's recent $40.1 billion supplemental appropriations request to Congress," the letter began. "The use of an 'emergency' supplemental appropriation reeks of the worst of Washington swampiness."

Leaders from The Heritage Foundation, Heritage Action for America, America First Policy Institute, Tea Party Patriots Action, and Americans for Limited Government were among the 10 fiscally conservative groups that signed the letter.

"While the war in Ukraine, natural disasters, and the border crisis are all serious issues, none were unforeseen at the start of the FY2024 appropriations process. Consideration of these appropriations should be part of the standard annual congressional appropriations process, which is ongoing," the leaders stressed in the letter.

Many other conservatives, including GOP presidential candidates Mike Pence and Nikki Haley, stand firmly in support of Ukraine.

House Foreign Affairs Chair Michael McCaul of Texas suggests that be thinks many of his colleagues in the House don't "quite understand what’s at stake.”

GOP Nebraska GOP Rep. Don Bacon addressed the issue at a town hall earlier this month.

“I told the town hall: ‘When I was a kid, if you had a bully on the playground — that bully never stops unless he gets punched in the nose,” Bacon told The Washington Post reported. “‘And so we’ve got to stand up to Putin here.’”

But Bacon said he included a caveat in that response too: “We shouldn’t give just a blank check to Biden. He’s got to justify why he needs this.”

The House, under the new rules of this term, will address 2024 spending in a series of separate appropriations bills in talks that will heat up as Congress returns to work after the summer break.

Congress, and not the executive branch, should be determining spending initiatives over ever-expanding emergency authorities, the letter continued.

"The use of a supplemental is intended to sidestep the critical work of allocating America's scarce resources to the needs that matter most — perhaps the single most important constitutional duty Congress maintains," it read.

"Congress must not enact a special appropriation to aimlessly fund a foreign war, irresponsibly replenish continuously exploited disaster relief accounts, and further enable the Biden administration's self-inflicted border crisis."

The letter noted that the Biden administration has already committed more than "$113 billion in 'aid and military assistance to support the Ukrainian government and allied nations,' equal to roughly $900 per American household" — all without much-needed congressional oversight for how the funds would actually be used.

"Yet, no publicly available accounting of how the U.S. economic and military funding has been used in Ukraine exists, and the Biden administration has failed to articulate a strategic plan or defined the end goal of this spending," the letter added. "Greenlighting the administration's recent request for an additional $24 billion to fund the war does not serve the interests of the American people.

"Absent a clear plan to achieve America's strategic interests and accountability to ensure what’s been spent has not been wasted, Congress must reject additional funding for Ukraine."