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.
Bryson Koehler is the chief technology officer at Equifax. He was previously CTO for IBM Watson and Cloud Platform, where he led a global team of cloud engineers, architects, security professionals, product and offering managers, technical communications specialists, research and development activities and operational systems reliability engineers.
With Koehler’s support, IBM reset its core strategic direction to be cloud-native and has radically advanced its cloud capabilities. By driving technical and cultural change and the way the company designed, built, and operated its core technology assets, Koehler helped accelerate IBM’s transformation. With security being a central priority for IBM, he brought all of the security teams together to ensure IBM had the world’s most compliant cloud, strengthening the company’s technical credibility.
Prior to his role at IBM Watson and Cloud Platform, Koehler was chief technology and information officer at The Weather Channel Companies (TWCC), before it was acquired in 2015 by IBM. In this position, he was responsible for setting the strategic vision, development, technical operations, financial planning and execution of all technology initiatives for TWCC. Under his leadership, the company launched its largest public, cloud-based API platform and migrated from 13 legacy data centers into a fully cloud-based company. Additionally, Koehler established leading partnerships with global technology companies such as Google, Apple, and Microsoft, as well as an independent developer network.
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Stefan Merz is COO of PPRO.
“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.