If you were to design a legislative provision outrageous enough to inspire another Tea Party-style political uprising, you would be hard-pressed to do better than section 5111 of the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021.
President Biden’s $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief clunker is full of items with perverse incentives (long-term unemployment top-offs and blue-state pension-fund bailouts) and others that are just obviously injurious (a federal minimum-wage hike which the Congressional Budget Office says would cost 1.4 million jobs). But nothing quite compares to its “Emergency Federal Employee Leave Fund” for the righteous indignation it should arouse in most Americans.
The provision sets aside money for a leave program that would allow any federal worker not working for the military to take up to 15 weeks of paid leave and collect up to $21,000 ($1,400 a week) between whenever the bill is passed and September 30, 2021, if the pandemic has had certain deleterious effects on their lives...
...For as long as schools remain closed — and remember, the Biden administration’s kind-of-sort-of, wishy-washy contention is that they should until more money is spent, even though there remains over $100 billion in unspent education appropriations from the last relief bill — bureaucrats whose paychecks are provided by John and Jane Q. Taxpayer would be able to collect from the comfort of their own homes, where they supervise their children and catch up on their favorite shows. Again, it’d be difficult to devise a targeted giveaway more likely to inspire wrath and resentment.
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