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.
Dominica DeGrandis is director of digital transformation at Tasktop. She teaches technology and business organizations how to optimize workflow across value stream networks. She helps teams reveal mutually critical information using Lean, Kanban and Flow methods. As author of “Making Work Visible - Exposing Time Theft to Optimize Work & Flow,” DeGrandis helps large organizations improve their capability to visualize workflows and create more business value. She blogs at ddegrandis.com and tasktop.com, and tweets at @dominicad.
Leo D’Acierno has two decades of experience managing and consulting to banks, brokerages and other financial services firms. Most recently, he served as a partner in the financial services practice in the New York office of Bain & Company. Mr. D’Acierno founded the bank consulting and information services firm PriMETRIQ in 2003 and later merged it into financial services specialist Novantas, where he led the distribution and sales practice and helped clients maximize the effectiveness of their investments in branch networks, professional sales forces and electronic channels. Mr. D'Acierno previously served in senior executive roles at TDAmeritrade, the online brokerage firm, and Kinexus, a provider of portfolio aggregation services to private banks and wealth management firms. Mr. D’Acierno began his career at BoozAllen and Hamilton, where he served as a partner in the financial services practice working with global banking, credit card and asset management clients. Mr. D’Acierno holds an A.B. in History and Economics from Harvard University.
Jim Leftwich has more than 30 years of leadership experience in risk management and insurance. In 2010, he founded CHSI Technologies, which offers SaaS enterprise management software for small insurance operations and government risk pools.
“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.