Administration officials defend executive action on pandemic relief
Businesses and the unemployed faced uncertainty as administration officials defended the president’s directives and Democrats criticized them.
WASHINGTON
President Donald Trump’s attempt to circumvent Congress to provide coronavirus relief in the absence of a broad agreement resulted in confusion and uncertainty Sunday for tens of millions of unemployed Americans and countless businesses seeking aid after critical benefits lapsed.
As negotiations with congressional Democrats remained at an impasse, administration officials were on the defensive a day after the president’s legally questionable executive actions, at times contradicting one another as they sought to explain how the measures would work and how quickly Americans could see any form of relief.
In a series of television appearances Sunday, they insisted that Americans would receive the aid promised by Trump, including a $400 weekly supplement to unemployment checks.
But that funding will be contingent on agreement from state officials, who are already struggling amid budget shortfalls caused by the economic crisis, and the siphoning of aid from a federal fund for disaster
relief in the middle of what is expected to be an active hurricane season.
The series of measures Trump signed Saturday were intended to revive unemployment benefits, address an eviction ban, provide relief for student borrowers and suspend collection of payroll taxes after two weeks of talks between congressional Democrats and administration officials failed to produce an agreement on a broader relief package.
But the patchwork of moves was less significant than what the president described in his news conference, and the plan appeared unlikely to have immediate, meaningful impact on the sputtering economy, in part because it provided no direct aid to struggling businesses.
Because Congress has the constitutional authority to allocate federal spending, Trump — who has frequently turned to unilateral action, as opposed to wrangling through tough negotiations — is likely to need congressional agreement, and legislation, to deliver additional financial relief to American families and businesses.
Democrats swiftly criticized Trump’s actions as an example of executive overreach, saying the measures offered thin support for struggling Americans and warning that the nation’s social safety net could be jeopardized while the coronavirus pandemic continued to spread. After two weeks of huddling with Trump’s top advisers on Capitol Hill in an effort to hammer out a deal, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California and Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic leader, called for talks to resume.
“The president’s meager, weak and unconstitutional actions further demand that we have an agreement,” Pelosi said on “Fox News Sunday.” She rejected the suggestion that she had erred by holding out for Democratic priorities, telling the program’s anchor, Chris Wallace, that “clearly you don’t have an understanding of what is happening here.”
Schumer, speaking on ABC’s “This Week,” declared that “the president’s executive orders, described in one word, could be paltry, in three words, unworkable, weak and far too narrow.”
Trump’s top economic advisers were on the defensive on the Sunday talk shows as they tried to justify the president’s authority to bypass Congress, which retains the constitutional power of the purse, to redirect billions of dollars.
They argued that Democrats, who first approved a $3.4 trillion stimulus package in May, were unwilling to compromise, particularly on sending additional aid to state and local governments.
Steven Mnuchin, the
Treasury secretary, called on Pelosi and Schumer to consider a more narrow package that addressed the issues where there was agreement, saying that negotiators had resolved most provisions except for reviving unemployment benefits and distributing money to state and local governments. (Drew Hammill, a spokesman for Pelosi, disputed that characterization.)
“We don’t have to get everything done at once,” Mnuchin said on “Fox News Sunday.” “What we should do is get things done for the American public now, come back for another bill afterward.”
He insisted that White House lawyers approved the moves as legal and dared Democrats to take the White House to court to stop money from being released to jobless Americans.
“If the Democrats want to challenge us in court and hold up unemployment benefits to those hardworking Americans that are out of a job because of COVID, they’re going to have a lot of explaining to do,” Mnuchin said.
But there was some acknowledgment that the measures could face legal challenges and were not as potent as congressional action.
A number of critical provisions are also left unaddressed without a broader deal, including a lapsed federal program for small businesses, another round of stimulus checks, aid to schools confronting the beginning of the academic year and funds for state and local governments reeling from the toll of the pandemic.
“The downside of executive orders is you can’t address some of the small business incidents that are there,” Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff, said in a pretaped interview that aired Sunday on Gray Television. “You can’t necessarily get direct payments, because it has to do with appropriations. That’s something that the president doesn’t have the ability to do. So you miss on those two key areas.
You miss on money for schools. You miss on any funding for state and local revenue needs that may be out there.”
White House lawyers had been crafting the executive actions over the past two weeks. By Friday, after the talks remained at a stalemate, it became clear that they would need to move forward with the plan. Trump was eager to sign the payroll tax order Friday evening, according to a senior administration official, but after his legal team said it was not yet ready, he opted to do so Saturday at his Bedminster golf club.
Officials in recent days had been debating which measures to employ, with Mnuchin resistant to the payroll tax suspension and Larry Kudlow, the director of the National Economic Council, arguing in support of it, according to a senior administration official. Although White House officials believe the executive actions have given Trump the upper hand, his advisers continue to say that more support for schools and another round of stimulus checks are needed to keep the economic recovery on track.
Among the most complicated measures is the president’s intention to revive lapsed weekly federal unemployment payments of $600 through the repurposing of other federal funds, including from a pot of disaster relief aid, to create a $400-a-week bonus payment. That payment, however, is contingent on states providing $100 per week and establishing an entirely new program — called a “lost wages assistance program” — to distribute the aid.
Kudlow argued that states would be able to support the demand for $100 a week given that billions of dollars allocated in the $2.2 trillion stimulus law in March had not yet been spent. But when pressed during an interview on CNN, he acknowledged that it remained unclear how much states would be able to provide and when those benefits would be distributed.
While Mnuchin said Sunday that states could waive the $100 fee and payments could start “immediately,” Kudlow said the payments could take a few weeks.
On CNN’s “State of the
Union,” Gov. Mike DeWine of Ohio, a Republican, said he was studying whether his state government could afford to pay an extra $100 a week for unemployment insurance as required by Trump’s latest order.
“The answer is, I don’t know,” DeWine said.
It also remains unclear whether Trump’s decision to suspend the payroll tax through December, deferring payments, would have any immediate effect. His push to suspend the tax has faced significant objections from both parties, with Senate Republicans ultimately leaving out the proposal altogether in the $1 trillion legislation they unveiled late last month.
Many companies are likely to decline to stop withholding money for payroll taxes since it is uncertain that they will ever be waived. But Mnuchin rejected suggestions from Democrats that deferring payroll taxes would lead to cuts in Social Security or Medicare benefits. The money that supports those programs would be backstopped by a transfer from the Treasury general fund, he said.
Still, he acknowledged that the payroll taxes would eventually have to be repaid unless Trump could reach a deal on legislation that would allow them to be waived or forgiven — an unlikely scenario — and that the deficit would continue to swell.