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 It’s not for want of funding.
The state’s Republican-led legislature this year voted down $40
million in federal aid available for COVID-19 testing in schools.
Another $1.8 billion in pandemic-related federal assistance is
sitting idle in the state treasury, waiting for lawmakers to deploy
it.
Some Idaho legislators have accused Washington of overreach and
reckless spending. Others see testing as disruptive and unnecessary,
particularly in schools, since relatively few children have died
from the disease.
"If you want your kids in school, you can't be testing," said state
Representative Ben Adams, a Republican who represents Nampa, a city
of about 100,000 people in southwestern Idaho.
Meanwhile, the state is reporting the fifth-highest infection rate
in the United States, at 369 confirmed cases per 100,000 people,
according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Schools in at least 14 of Idaho's 115 districts, including Nampa,
have had to close temporarily due to COVID-19 outbreaks since the
start of the year, according to Burbio, a digital platform that
tracks U.S. school activity.
Idaho's experience illustrates how political ideology and
polarization around the COVID-19 epidemic have played a role in the
decision of mostly conservative states to reject some federal
funding meant to help locals officials battle the virus and its
economic fallout.
For example, Idaho was one of 26 Republican-led states that ended
enhanced federally funded unemployment benefits before they were due
to expire in September. Gov. Brad Little claimed that money was
discouraging the jobless from returning to work. At least six
studies have found that the extra benefits have had little to no
impact on the U.S. labor market.
Idaho has also rebuffed $6 million for early-childhood education, as
some Republicans in the state said mothers should be the primary
caretakers of their children.
The state also did not apply for $6 million that would have
bolstered two safety-net programs that aid mothers of young children
and working families. Little's administration said it had enough
money already for those programs.
Idaho has accepted some federal COVID-19 help. In fact, the rejected
funds are just a small portion of the nearly $2 billion in federal
relief Idaho has spent since March 2020 to fight the virus and shore
up businesses and families, state figures show.
But hundreds of millions more remain untouched. Idaho has deployed
just $780 million, or 30%, of the $2.6 billion it received under the
federal American Rescue Plan Act, signed into law in March.
Neighboring Washington state, by contrast, has parceled out nearly
three-quarters of the $7.8 billion it received under that
legislation. Washington has recorded roughly 60% as many cases per
capita as Idaho since the start of the pandemic, according to the
U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Some in Idaho are exasperated that a state of just 1.8 million
people would turn down a dime of assistance when it’s struggling to
tame the pandemic.
With no testing in place, nurses in Nampa schools rely mainly on
parents to let them know when a child is infected, the district's
top nurse, Rebekah Burley, told the school board in September. She
said she needed three or four more staffers to track existing cases
and attempt to keep people quarantined.
"We're tired, we are stressed, and something needs to change," she
said.
REJECTING FEDERAL MONEY
The refusal by red states to accept some types of federal aid that
would benefit their constituents isn't new.
For example, a dozen Republican-controlled states have rejected
billions of dollars available through the landmark 2010 Affordable
Health Care Act to cover more people under the Medicaid health
program for the poor, which is jointly funded by the federal
government and the states. Lawmakers from these places contended
their states couldn’t afford to pay their share of an expansion.
(Idaho initially was among them, but its voters opted in to the
Medicaid expansion through a 2018 ballot referendum, bypassing state
leaders.)
That same dynamic has played out during the coronavirus crisis.
Since March 2020, Congress has approved six aid packages totaling
$4.7 trillion under Republican and Democratic administrations,
including the bipartisan CARES Act in March 2020 and the
Democratic-backed American Rescue Plan Act this year.
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 Florida and Mississippi didn't
apply for benefits that would give more money to
low-income mothers of young children. Four
states, including Idaho, North Dakota and
Oklahoma, opted not to extend a program that
provided grocery money to low-income families
with school-age kids in summer months.
Iowa, like Idaho, turned down federal money for
COVID-19 testing in schools. New Hampshire
rejected money for vaccinations.
Republican lawmakers in Idaho, like those
elsewhere, cite concerns about local control,
restrictive terms attached to some of the aid,
and the skyrocketing national debt.
"We are chaining future generations to a lifetime of financial
slavery," said Adams, the Idaho legislator.
Yet even before the pandemic, Idaho long relied on Washington for
much of its budget. Federal funds account for 36% of state spending
in Idaho, according to the National Association of State Budget
Officers, above the national average of 32%.
State officials say they have enough money to handle the COVID-19
crisis for now.
Critics say Idaho's reluctance to use more federal aid is a symptom
of its hands-off approach to COVID-19 safety. Few public schools
require masks, and local leaders have refused to impose mask
mandates, limits on indoor gatherings and other steps to contain the
virus. "There's a lot of people in our legislature
and some local officials who really have not taken this seriously,"
said David Pate, the former head of St. Luke's Health System, the
state's largest hospital network.
Idaho has one of the lowest vaccination rates in the nation, with
only 55% of adults and teens fully immunized, compared to 67%
nationally.
HOSPITALS FULL
COVID-19 is pummeling Idaho even as cases have plunged in much of
the nation. Intensive-care units statewide are full, forcing
hospitals to turn away non-COVID patients. At least 627 residents
died of the disease in October, well above the previous monthly
death toll of last winter, records show.
Idaho received $18 million through the American
Rescue Plan to hire more public-health workers, but lawmakers did
nothing with that money this year.
Some local public health departments say they do not have enough
staff to track the virus. "We have a lot of people doing two or
three jobs right now," said Brianna Bodily, a spokesperson for the
public-health agency serving Twin Falls, a southern Idaho city of
50,000. The department is working with a 12% smaller budget than
last year.
Such staff shortages have contributed to a backlog of test results
statewide, which the Idaho Department of Health and Welfare says is
hurting its ability to provide an up-to-date picture of the
disease's prevalence.
With funding bottled up in the state capitol, Little, the governor,
announced in August that he would steer $30 million from a previous
round of COVID-19 aid to school testing. The Nampa
school district has requested some of that money but has yet to set
up a testing program, spokeswoman Kathleen Tuck said. Roughly 20% of
the district's students were not attending class regularly in the
first weeks of the school year due to outbreaks, according to
superintendent Paula Kellerer.
Nampa resident Jaci Johnson, a mother of two children, ages 10 and
13, said she and other parents have been torn over whether to send
their children to class, due to the potential risk.
"Do we feed our kids to the lions, or do we keep them home and make
them miserable?" Johnson said.
(Corrects spelling of Nampa schools spokeswoman, percentage of
students absent)
(Reporting by Andy Sullivan; Editing by Scott Malone and Marla
Dickerson)
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