Has $1 trillion in COVID-19 relief gone unspent?

PUBLISHED FEBRUARY 23, 2021: House Democrats are forging ahead with a vote on a $1.9 trillion package to address the coronavirus and fix the economic damage that cost about 10 million people their jobs. Rep. Steve Scalise, second in command of the House Republicans, said that he and his colleagues support spending more to overcome the pandemic, but that the Democratic plan is chock full of unneeded giveaways.

"There's over a trillion dollars of money unspent from previous relief bills that were bipartisan," Scalise, R-La., said Feb. 21 on ABC’s This Week. "The money's still sitting in a bank account and we're going to pass $1.9 trillion of additional spending to bail out failed states, to raise the minimum wage? What does that have to do with COVID?"

The claim that there is $1 trillion left over from earlier efforts is a top Republican talking point. Scalise led with the same argument in a Feb. 19 op-ed.

His source is the COVID Money Tracker, a project of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a group focused on reducing federal deficits. The tracker’s latest number shows that out of $4.1 trillion approved by Congress, about $3 trillion has been committed or disbursed.