NOTICIAS

Washington, D.C. – U.S. Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) today met with Dr. Tom Frieden, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, to discuss efforts to combat the Zika virus. Florida Governor Rick Scott, U.S. Reps. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen and Mario Diaz-Balart, and a representative from U.S. Rep. Carlos Curbelo’s office also participated in the meeting, which was held in Rubio’s Senate office in Doral.
 
After the meeting, Rubio made the following remarks:
 
“The one thing that [we] discussed was whether we can – knowing that the likelihood of Congress coming back into session in August is not high, inexcusable, but not high – is perhaps finding other money in the federal budget, perhaps in other agencies, that can be repurposed and moved around into the sorts of programs that they’re trying to see funded. And obviously there’s a process for doing that, so we’re going to begin to explore that in both the House and the Senate side because we think that’s important. What we don’t want to see here is … that somehow these programs run out of money in August and Congress isn’t coming back until the first week of September.

…
 
“We now live in a time in our American politics, especially in DC unfortunately, where they can turn Santa Claus into a partisan issue. And Zika funding should’ve passed in April, May, June – if not in July. It’s unacceptable that we have reached this point, but better late than never. It is time to act. I hope we’ll do it as soon as possible.
 
“What we’re trying to do is develop – knowing the process as we do – we may be disappointed, but we also have to be realistic about the realities. What if Congress doesn’t come back? What do we do? We have to have a Plan B. So we are going to continue to push on Plan A, which is to get the Congress to come back and act. We have to have a Plan B to make sure that we don’t run out of funds at the end of August, because we don’t know where we’re going to be on this issue at the end of this month.”
 
The photo below can be credited to the office of U.S. Senator Marco Rubio.