Political contention over emergency Zika funds is likely to continue as the Republican-majority House passed a bill Wednesday that would grant $622.1 million to the fight. The bill is more than a billion dollars shy of President Barack Obama's initial request for $1.9 billion.
The House's bill comes after the Republican-led Senate reached a bipartisan compromise on Tuesday and voted to allocate $1.1 billion toward the fight, according to Reuters.
The House's bill, unlike the Senate's, requires that funds for Zika be offset by cuts elsewhere. House legislators have argued that the $589 million in surplus Ebola money diverted by the Obama administration combined with their new proposed funding should be enough to combat the virus through the end of the fiscal year, Sept. 30.
The White House has categorized the House bill as "woefully insufficient" and threatened to veto the measure.
In recent months, federal health officials have been vocally calling for more fiscal support to combat the Zika virus domestically.
See where Zika has been reported in the U.S. since May 13 here.
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