There is bipartisan support in Congress for legislation to require oversight of the lethal aid and defense weapons supplied to Ukraine, which is now roughly $20 billion and counting.
The Biden administration, facing a GOP-led House, through the State Department and Pentagon has worked in recent weeks to publicize tracking of weapons shipments to Ukraine.
But experts are trying to back insistent Republicans off their demands for a full accounting of what Ukraine has received from the U.S. amid the war Russia has waged over the territories in the south along the Black Sea.
"There are shortcomings of end-use monitoring in the best of circumstances, and of course Ukraine isn't in the best of circumstances," the Stimson Center's Elias Yousif told The Washington Post. "There has to be some willingness to be practical about what we can achieve."
The "blank check" to Ukraine cannot go on indefinitely, according to House GOP Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif. – although both Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and NATO Secretary Gen. Jens Stoltenberg repeated their "as long at it takes" vow on supporting non-NATO member Ukraine against Russian aggression.
"There has to be accountability going forward," McCarthy told CNN in a recent interview.
Amid Biden's request for another $37 billion to Ukraine, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., vowed the House GOP "will hold our government accountable for all of the funding for Ukraine."
The House-passed defense authorization bill includes provisions to require reports from the Pentagon and inspectors general, along with creating a task force to monitor the aid to Ukraine.
Those are done with the intention to keep the aid from winding up in the wrong hands – not to police Ukraine amid its defense of life, freedom, and territory against Russia – which has bipartisan support, according to the Post.
"The taxpayers deserve to know that investment is going where its intended to go," Rep. Jason Crow, D-Colo., a military veteran, told the Post.
"In any war, there can be missteps and misallocation of supplies.
"We're not playing a mission of perfection here. This is a brutal, large-scale land war — house to house, street to street, trench to trench. There will be things lost," he continued. "We're not trying to prevent every single piece from falling into the hands of the Russians, but we want to make sure it’s not happening at a large scale."
The efforts to police Ukraine's use of lethal aid in its war might ultimately cost even more for taxpayers. Inspectors will need to be added, and often will not be able to safely get to the front line in southern Ukraine, according to Pentagon press secretary Brig. Gen. Patrick Ryder.
"With the volumes of goods that we're pushing, it's our responsibility to have third-party oversight," Rep. Mike Waltz, R-Fla., said. "We do it all over the world."
And that includes places "that are much higher on the corruption and transparency index" than Ukraine, Waltz added.
"There is an acceptable risk to having people behind the front lines checking on where all this aid is going and helping the Ukrainians use it more effectively," Waltz concluded.
Eric Mack ✉
Eric Mack has been a writer and editor at Newsmax since 2016. He is a 1998 Syracuse University journalism graduate and a New York Press Association award-winning writer.
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