Donald Trump signs Covid-19 relief and spending
bill
Move comes after Republicans voiced anger over the
delay, which resulted in millions of Americans losing unemployment aid
Guardian
staff and agencies
Mon 28 Dec
2020 01.44 GMT
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/dec/28/donald-trump-signs-covid-19-relief-and-spending-bill
Donald
Trump has signed the Covid-19 relief and spending bill after days of delays,
preventing a mid-pandemic government shutdown.
The
announcement on Sunday night after Republicans urged him to act following his
refusal to sign the bill, a decision that meant millions of Americans lost
unemployment aid.
Trump
blindsided members of both parties and upended months of negotiations when he
demanded last week that the package – already passed by the House and Senate by
large margins and believed to have Trump’s support – be revised to include
larger relief checks and scaled-back spending.
But on
Sunday night Trump released a statement that he had signed the bill, saying it
was his “responsibility to protect the people of our country from the economic
devastation and hardship” caused by coronavirus.
“As
president, I have told Congress that I want far less wasteful spending and more
money going to the American people in the form of $2,000 checks per adult and
$600 per child.
“I will
sign the omnibus and Covid package with a strong message that makes clear to
Congress that wasteful items need to be removed. I will send back to Congress a
redlined version, item by item, accompanied by the formal rescission request to
Congress insisting that those funds be removed from the bill.
“I am
signing this bill to restore unemployment benefits, stop evictions, provide
rental assistance, add money for PPP, return our airline workers back to work,
add substantially more money for vaccine distribution, and much more.”
Senate
majority leader, Mitch McConnell, welcomed the move.
Stock
markets in Asia ticked upwards on news that Trump had signed the bill, and US
stock futures rose 0.4%.
In the face
of growing economic hardship and spreading disease, lawmakers had urged Trump
on Sunday to sign the legislation immediately, then have Congress follow up
with additional aid. Aside from unemployment benefits and relief payments to
families, money for vaccine distribution, businesses, and cash-starved public
transit systems is on the line. Protections against evictions also hang in the
balance.
It was not
immediately clear why Trump changed his mind as his resistance to the massive
legislative package promised a chaotic final stretch of his presidency.
White House
officials have been tight-lipped about Trump’s thinking but a source familiar
with the situation cited by Reuters said that some advisers had urged him to
relent because they did not see the point of refusing.
Earlier on
Sunday, Republican senator Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania said he understood that
Trump “wants to be remembered for advocating for big checks, but the danger is
he’ll be remembered for chaos and misery and erratic behavior if he allows this
to expire”.
Toomey
added: “So I think the best thing to do, as I said, sign this and then make the
case for subsequent legislation.”
The same
point was echoed by Maryland’s governor, Larry Hogan, a Republican who has
criticised Trump’s pandemic response and his efforts to undo the election
results. “I just gave up guessing what he might do next,” he said.
Republican
representative Adam Kinzinger of Illinois said too much was at stake for Trump
to “play this old switcheroo game”.
“I don’t
get the point,” he said. “I don’t understand what’s being done, why, unless
it’s just to create chaos and show power and be upset because you lost the
election.”
Washington
has been reeling since Trump turned on the deal, without warning, after it had
won sweeping approval in both houses of Congress and after the White House had
assured Republican leaders that Trump would support it.
The bill
had lain unsigned on his desk since Christmas Day as the president, who was
mostly silent through weeks of intense negotiations, spent the weekend at the
Trump International Golf Course in West Palm Beach.
Instead, he
assailed the bill’s plan to provide $600 Covid-19 relief checks to most
Americans – insisting it should be $2,000 – and took issue with spending
included in an attached $1.4 trillion government funding bill to keep the federal
government operating through September.
And
already, his opposition has had consequences, as two federal programs providing
unemployment aid expired on Saturday.
Lauren
Bauer of the Brookings Institution had calculated that at least 11 million people
would lose aid immediately as a result of Trump’s failure to sign the
legislation; millions more would exhaust other unemployment benefits within
weeks.
How and
when people are affected by the lapse depends on the state they live in, the
program they are relying on and when they applied for benefits.
In some
states, people on regular unemployment insurance will continue to receive
payments under a program that extends benefits when the jobless rate surpassed
a certain threshold, said Andrew Stettner, an unemployment insurance expert and
senior fellow at the Century Foundation think tank.
About 9.5
million people, however, had been relying on the pandemic unemployment
assistance program that expired altogether Saturday. That program made
unemployment insurance available to freelancers, gig workers and others
normally not eligible. After receiving their last checks, those recipients will
not be able to file for more aid, Stettner said.
Joe Biden,
who won November’s presidential election and who will be sworn in as Trump’s
successor on 20 January, accused him of an “abdication of responsibility” in a
statement on Saturday.
The relief
bill wrangles come as the coronavirus pandemic continues to worsen in the US,
with medical experts joining Biden in predicting that the darkest days lay
ahead.
“We very
well might see a post-seasonal, in the sense of Christmas, New Year, surge,” Dr
Anthony Fauci, the US head of infectious diseases, told CNN on Sunday.
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