As Ukraine blames ammunition shortages for recent territorial losses, the Republican-led US House of Representatives has failed to throw Kyiv a lifeline, refusing to bring a vote on a senate-passed emergency spending bill with $60 billion to support Ukraine.

Nobody agrees with what Putin's done, but when we're taking our hard-earned tax dollars and sending them 5,000 miles away, without any end in sight meanwhile our borders are wide open and our American citizens are being murdered on their streets, that's a problem.

But most of the funds lawmakers have approved to arm Ukraine aren't going directly there, they're being spent here in the United States in plants like this, York Pennsylvania plant in the congressman's district to build new weapons and to replace the old weapons sent to Kyiv from US stockpiles.

The York plant is one of dozens of defense industrial facilities, injected with congressional funds in support of Ukraine's fight.

Those facilities range from private factories to government laboratories to ammunition plants, that are, you know, World War I or World War II era that are desperately in need of modernization.

VOA gained rare access to the Scranton Army Ammunition plant, about 3 hours north of York to see firsthand how those tax dollars are spent.

Here, steel rods are molded in the fiery Scranton furnaces, forged into 155 mm AR artillery round shells.

The shells are cooled, inspected and painted to prevent rusting before they're shipped off to be packed with explosives.

Northeast Pennsylvania production has doubled from 14,000,155 mm shells per month at the start of the Ukraine war to 28,000 per month today.

And plant contractor General Dynamics says that number will jump to 36,000 per month when a new production line in a nearby plant goes live in a few weeks.