Presidents and congresses come and go, but one thing stays the same in Washington: there’s one rule when it comes military spending, and a completely different one for every other urgent need.

For a week now, political observers have been watching what seem like two parallel realities playing out in the US capital. In one, despite the staggering fact that the COVID-19 pandemic continues to kill more than a thousand Americans per day, and a new subvariant on its way could take that number even higher, the federal government is running out of money to deal with it.

After requesting $22.5 billion in emergency money to fund testing, treatment, and vaccines in advance of a coming virus surge, twenty-five Republican senators came out in opposition, saying they wanted a “full accounting of how the government has already spent the first $6 trillion.” Democratic leaders tried to get $15.6 billion passed instead, partly by plundering state aid that already been passed in previous legislation, but governors and rank-and-file Democrats understandably opposed that, calling for new spending instead. The White House is now warning it will have to ration treatments and make cutbacks to testing and vaccination as early as this week, and that testing capacity could collapse by the middle of the year.