President Donald Trump signed a bill containing $900 billion in pandemic relief, the White House said, triggering the flow of aid to individuals and businesses and averting the risk of a partial government shutdown on Tuesday.
In addition to aid to stem the economic effects of the pandemic, the legislation Congress passed Monday also includes $1.4 trillion in government spending to fund federal agencies through the end of the fiscal year in September. The government had been operating on temporary spending authority that expires after the end of the day Monday.
Michael Sternklar is CEO of benefitexpress.
Vladimir Gorbunov is COO and co-founder of Crypterium.
ProtectWise CTO and co-founder Gene Stevens drives the company’s technology vision and architecture. He is a serial entrepreneur with more than 20 years of experience in software development, cloud computing, security-as-a-service, and distributed systems. Prior to founding ProtectWise, Gene was the Founder and CTO at TagLabs, a mobile tagging company. He was previously a Principal Software Engineer at McAfee, Cloud & Content Security, developing the company’s email, web security and data loss prevention products. He joined McAfee upon its acquisition of MX Logic where he was Senior Software Engineer. Gene also held a lead engineering role with GDX, developing secure email and file transfer services based in Tokyo. Early in his career, Gene developed financial forecasting, market analysis and service capacity planning software for Hewitt Associates (Aon). Gene is an expert and a leader on scalability, high throughput and low latency services, and distributed systems design. He is a frequent speaker at security and technology conferences and is covered by the media. Gene is also a member of the Board of Directors for the Open Information Security Foundation in support of open-source security technologies.
The combined $2.3 trillion package was the product of intense negotiations, from which Trump was largely absent until he surprised lawmakers of both parties by demanding bigger stimulus payments for individuals after the bill was already passed.
Trump said in the statement announcing the signing that the GOP Senate had agreed to vote on increasing the $600 individual payments and two other, unrelated matters dealing with social media and his unfounded allegations of voter fraud.
His delay in signing it means those aid payments will likely be later than Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin had promised and may cut a week from the supplemental unemployment benefits that were part of the package and scheduled to end in March.
The virus relief package will likely be the last major legislation signed by Trump, whose re-election hopes were dashed in large part due to his handling of the pandemic.
President-elect Joe Biden has said he will push for even more stimulus after taking office early next year, but it remains unclear whether Republicans in Congress would go along. Control of the Senate will be determined by the outcome of two runoff elections in Georgia on Jan 5.
Lawmakers approved the government funding and additional relief at the last possible moment before they were set to leave Washington for a year-end break. Business leaders have called on Congress to pass more stimulus for months, saying that restaurants, theaters, mom-and-pop stores and airlines were being decimated by closures and restrictions as Covid-19 cases spiked in the U.S.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer announced a relief deal on Sunday after more than a week of frantic talks sparked by a bipartisan group of senators who drafted their own compromise proposal and urged their leaders to act. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, representing the administration, also was involved in the talks.
Trump surprised even his fellow Republicans on Tuesday by tweeting a video saying that he wanted Congress to increase the size of stimulus payments for individuals to $2,000, from the $600 in the bill Congress passed. He also complained about federal spending on foreign aid and international programs, even though those funds were allocated as part of the bipartisan appropriations process for funding the government.