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this post was submitted on 04 Dec 2023
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You're not wrong, though the act is expired now. So they would have to repass it if they want to give aid to Ukraine that way. Honestly though that act was passed more symbolically than practically for its WWII connotations. Saddling Ukraine with even more debt through lend lease isn't a great way to support them long term. If all we had done was loans up to this point they'd have had to add nearly the current gdp of their countries worth to make up for the aid they received so far. They shouldn't have to burden all the monetary costs in addition to their loss of life and their half destroyed country while they're checking Putin's imperialist ambitions, and doing a service for especially Europe but the whole world.
Just like the US has been trying to hurt the Russian economy, they're also trying to prop up the Ukrainian one. Imposing large debts on their economy will not help, they're struggling with the funds to repair critical infrastructure deliberately destroyed by Russia and keep their military running, struggling to keep lines of credit open for more basic things. It's hard to keep your economy running and collect taxes with wide spread bombing of civilian areas across the country (with much of your former economic powerhouse areas destroyed or occupied by Russia). The original lend lease was more of a pretext than anything anyways (look I'm not aiding you, I'm not in the war, it's just a loan), and in the end much of that debt was forgiven so wasn't even really a loan, and we ended up giving a ton more aid on top of it, besides the obvious like the US eventually entering the war, this included the Marshall plan, etc.
All of this is to say, sure re pass lend lease for the flexibility too, but right now there's no way for the US to provide additional monetary aid unless congress acts.
Lend/lease never hits the books. Most of the lend/lease of WWII was forgiven.
Yeah that's what I'm saying, it's a pretext. Initially we wanted to pretend we weren't giving aid to the allies in WWII. Though it'd be inaccurate to say it never hits the books. Portions of it were repaid after WWII. You'd still need another act to forgive that debt though, as far as I'm aware there's no provision in the law for the president to unilaterally forgive the debt. So you'd have to ask congress, and be right back where you started. And why go through all the hoops? Just allot the aid instead of hurting Ukraine's credit for no reason for a while if you're planning on eventually forgiving it. It'd still be nice to have the option to kind of paper over any funding gaps like what's happening right now, shame that now is when it's expired otherwise they could be using it as a stop gap. But I suspect that's why the Republicans chose now.