House Republicans blocked Democrats’ attempt to meet President Donald Trump’s demand to pay most Americans $2,000 to help weather the coronavirus pandemic.
Republicans objected to the bill House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer sought to pass by unanimous consent Thursday to replace the $600 payments in the latest pandemic relief legislation with the $2,000 payments.
Rob Berg is a Principal & Director in Perr&Knight’s Operations & Technology Consulting Practice. During his twenty-plus year consulting career, Rob has designed, planned and executed operational improvements yielding more than $100 million in cost savings; effected process redesigns to maximize the benefit of new technology adoptions; planned the deployment of core software application replacements; and provided financial and strategic analyses in support of major technology investments.
Andrew is the co-founder and co-CEO of Ascend, a modern, all-in-one payments solution purpose-built for insurance with offices in California and New York. Before Andrew's career in insurance, Andrew was an employee at Instacart, where he met colleague and future co-founder Praveen Chekuri. Prior to founding Ascend, Andrew and Praveen co-founded Sheltr, which was acquired by Hippo Insurance in 2019.
Kedar Kamalapurkar is Managing director and a leader in the insurance sector claims practice at Deloitte Consulting LLP. He has nearly 15 years of experience in claims operations, including as a claims adjuster. He has led claims transformations from strategy to execution for many of the major insurance carriers in the United States and Europe. Kedar also holds insurance industry professional designations from CPCU, AIC, API, and AINS.
“House and Senate Democrats have repeatedly fought for bigger checks for the American people, which House and Senate Republicans have repeatedly rejected — first, during our negotiations when they said that they would not go above $600 and now, with this act of callousness on the Floor,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said in a statement Thursday.
Democrats will try again with a roll call vote on a new bill Dec. 28, when the House also plans a vote to override Trump’s veto on the National Defense Authorization Act. Since current government spending runs out that day — and funds for the rest of the fiscal year are included in the virus relief bill Trump criticized and hasn’t signed -- the House could also pass another stopgap measure to avert a partial government shutdown.
Republicans on Thursday tried to seek unanimous consent on a measure to examine taxpayer money spent on foreign aid, but Democrats blocked that move. In his complaint Tuesday about Congress’s combined virus aid and government spending bill, Trump criticized federal resources spent on international programs, even though that spending was allocated as part of the bipartisan appropriations process.