Top Senate Democrats are demanding to know why the Trump administration has not yet spent funds that Congress allocated earlier this year to ramp up the nation’s coronavirus testing and contact tracing capacity.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Sen. Patty Murray (Wash.), the top Democrat on the Senate health committee, wrote a letter to Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar over the weekend inquiring about the status of nearly $14 billion in funding for coronavirus testing they say has yet to go out the door.
The emergency coronavirus stimulus legislation Congress passed in March, titled the CARES Act, included $25 billion to help expand state and local testing efforts. According to Schumer and Murray, the Trump administration has yet to distribute more than $8 billion of that package, in addition to other funds Congress set aside to provide free testing for the uninsured.
The U.S. is finally reporting 500,000 coronavirus tests a day ― a level experts say is needed to properly track and contain the outbreak. But the milestone was only reached in mid-June, months after the coronavirus pandemic began, with over 120,000 deaths and counting. | 
