STIMULUS TALKS at impasse as $600 unemployment benefit set to expire.
WASHINGTON — Negotiations on a new coronavirus relief bill hit an impasse on Capitol Hill on Wednesday, leaving no clear path forward even as millions of Americans face a sudden drop in unemployment benefits and the economy teeters on the brink.
A meeting between top White House officials and Democratic leaders ended with no agreement on extending emergency unemployment benefits that expire on Friday, or on reviving a moratorium on evictions that lapsed last week.
That means about 20 million jobless Americans will lose $600 weekly enhanced unemployment benefits that Congress approved in March. This money is separate from state benefits.
After a day of meetings, all parties declared their differences all but irreconcilable. Democrats shot down the idea of a short-term fix for unemployment insurance and the eviction moratorium, which President Donald Trump had announced earlier Wednesday he would support.
And the two parties remained far apart on a larger bill, with Democrats standing by their wide-ranging $3 trillion proposal even as Republicans struggled to coalesce around a $1 trillion bill released by Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., on Monday.
“I don’t know that there is another plan, other than: No deal,” White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows said. “Which will allow unemployment, enhanced unemployment, I might add, to expire. … No deal certainly becomes a greater possibility the longer these negotiations go.”
Meadows offered his assessment as he headed into his third straight day of meetings with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., at the Capitol. He was no more upbeat when he came out.
“We are nowhere close to a deal,” Meadows said.
McConnell held out hope in an evening interview with PBS NewsHour, saying: “This is only Wednesday. So hope springs eternal that we’ll reach some kind of agreement, either on a broad basis or a more narrow basis to avoid having an adverse impact on unemployment.”
Earlier Wednesday, Trump had called for a quick fix to address the unemployment benefits and eviction moratorium, saying other issues could wait.
“The rest of it, we’re so far apart, we don’t care, we really don’t care,” Trump told reporters outside the White House, referring to divisions between the two parties.
Underscoring the continued need, the head of the Federal Reserve said Wednesday that the rise of coronavirus cases since mid-June is weighing on the economy.
“On balance, it looks like the data are pointing to a slowing in the pace of the recovery,” Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell said during a news conference Wednesday. “I want to stress it’s too early to say both how large that is and how sustained it will be.”
Powell said funding from the $2 trillion Cares Act passed in March was key to keeping people in their homes and jobs. He pointed to the success of the small-business Paycheck Protection Program for getting money directly to businesses that could not necessarily have been saved through a Fed lending program.
A Republican proposal to slash the $600 weekly benefit boost for those left jobless because of the coronavirus shutdown could result in weeks or even months of delayed payments in some states.
Older computer systems that took weeks to set up for the initial federal unemployment enhancement would need to be reprogrammed again twice under the GOP plan.
Republican fiscal conservatives are attempting to put the brakes on new spending after their party presided over tax cuts and spending that have swelled the federal deficit.
The concern about deficits and debt comes a few months after the House and Senate approved with overwhelming bipartisan votes the biggest economic stimulus package in history, and as Congress wrangles a follow-on measure with the economy staggered by another surge of coronavirus cases and deaths.
McConnell has touted the smaller price tag of the Republican package relative to the $3 trillion Democratic proposal as a sign of fiscal prudence. That hasn’t sold it to a sizable number of Republicans in the Senate.
“There is significant resistance to yet another trillion dollars,” Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, who’s been among the most vocal critics, told reporters this week. “The answer to these challenges will not simply be shoveling cash out of Washington.”
And Republican Sen. Ben Sasse of Nebraska torched both the White House and Democrats for proposals to add to the red ink.
“The White House is trying to solve bad polling by agreeing to indefensibly bad debt,” he said. “This proposal is not targeted to fix precise problems — it’s about Democrats and Trumpers competing to outspend each other.”
McConnell said GOP leaders did their best to craft a package that the broadest group of Republicans could support, but acknowledged his party is divided.
“It’s a statement of the obvious that I have members who are all over the lot on this,” McConnell said. “There are some members who think we’ve already done enough, other members who think we need to do more. This is a complicated problem.”