WASHINGTON, D.C. — Unprecedented times calls for unprecedented spending according to Congress. 

In the past 12 months, it has appropriated more than three times as much money to fight the pandemic than it has spent on the annual federal budget several times over. 

To put that into perspective, the final FY2020 spending package was worth $1.4 trillion. The American Rescue Plan, the last COVID-19 relief bill signed into law by Pres. Biden last week was worth $1.9 trillion.

U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wisconsin) who voted against every stimulus bill except two, believes Congress has been misusing the power of the purse during this time.

“I knew we were in trouble when we started talking about trillions rather than hundreds of billions of dollars,” Johnson said. “And so now it's a little it's just an extra $1.9 trillion. It's a massive amount of money. We did not need to authorize, we had plenty sitting there unspent, we shouldn't try to do that better.”

But Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wisconsin) said this investment has been well-worth the costs.

“This measure takes a very different approach of meeting the basic needs of individuals and families, small businesses in our society, and those struggling to keep a roof over their head to put food on the table ”

Need aside, the biggest criticism from opponents — as Sen. Johnson pointed out — is the money that fell through the cracks. While several trillion has been appropriated, the nonpartisan watchdog group Project on Government Oversight (POGO) said it's hard to accurately track how much of these funds have been used.

“In part because, under the Trump administration, the White House's Office of Management and Budget directed agencies not to collect some of the information that would be needed to really answer with specificity: how much have we spent so far and where has it gone,” said Liz Hempowicz, POGO Director of Public Policy.

In lieu of accurate reporting, POGO has been tracking federal spending based on publicly available information

Hempowicz said there were oversight provisions outlined in the $2 trillion CARES Act, but the previous administration did a poor job of implementing them. They were to report to three major mechanisms included in the law: the Pandemic Response Accountability Committee (PARC) made up of Inspectors Generals from several agencies, a Congressional Oversight Commission and a new office in the Treasury Department called the Special Inspector General for Pandemic Recovery.

“Congressionally directed spending must be subject to transparency and rigorous oversight,” said Hempowicz. “And that legislative directives on how to implement relief programs need to be as prescriptive as possible.”

Even with missteps, Hempowicz believes the government can still hold itself accountable.

“We [now] see Congress and the agencies working to find or correct the problem,” she said. “Unfortunately, I talked about the lack of capital that a lot of small businesses have access to [due to the initial rollout of the PPP loans]. I think, for many small businesses, it was a little bit too late. But it's not too late to try to correct the problem moving forward. And it's certainly not too late to try to learn lessons from this rollout and how we've instituted this program so that in future emergency situations which we don't know what they'll look like, but we know they're going to happen in the future that we can be better situated to respond to the similar crisis is when they come up.”