Congress seals $1T virus relief bill
Aid delivers $300B to businesses, $300-perweek for the jobless.
WASHINGTON — Top Capitol Hill negotiators sealed a deal Sunday on an almost $1 trillion COVID-19 economic relief package, finally delivering long-overdue help to businesses and individuals and providing money to deliver vaccines to a nation eager for them.
The agreement, announced by Senate leaders, would establish a temporary $300 per week supplemental jobless benefits and $600 direct stimulus payments to most Americans, along with a new round of subsidies for hard-hit businesses and money for schools, health care providers and renters facing eviction.
The House was expected to vote on the legislation today. The
House would pass a one-day stopgap spending bill to avert a government shutdown at midnight Sunday. The Senate was likely to vote today, too. Lawmakers were eager to leave Washington and close out a tumultuous year.
“There will be another major rescue package for the American people,” SenateMajority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said in announcing the agreement for a relief bill
that would total almost $900 billion. “It is packed with targeted policies to help strug- gling Americans who have already waited too long.”
A breakthrough came Saturday in a fight over Federal Reserve emergency powers that was resolved by the Senate’s top Democrat, Chuck Schumer, and Republican Pat Toomey. That led to a final round of negotiations.
The final agreement is the largest spending measure yet. It combines COVID-19 relief with a $1.4 trillion government-wide funding plan and lots of other unrelated measures on taxes, health, infrastructure and education. Passage is nearing as corona- virus cases and deaths spike and evidence piles up that the economy is struggling.
Late-breaking decisions would limit the $300 per week bonus jobless benefits
— one half the supplemen- tal federal unemployment benefit provided under the CARES Act in March — to 10 weeks instead of 16 weeks as before. The direct $600 stimulus payment to most people is also half the March payment, subject to the same income limits in which an individual’s payment begins to phase out after $75,000.
It would be the first significant legislative response to the pandemic since the $1.8 trillion CARES Act passed virtually unanimously in March.
Progress slowed Saturday as Toomey pressed for the inclusion of a provision to close down the Fed’s lending facilities. Democrats and the White House said it was too broadly worded and would have tied the hands of the incoming Biden administration, but Republicans rallied to Toomey’s position.
The Fed’s emergency programs provided loans to busi- nesses and bought state and local government bonds.
Those bond purchases made it easier for governments to borrow, at a time when their finances were under pressure from job losses and health costs stemming from the pandemic.
Toomey said the emergency powers were designed to stabilize capital markets at the height of the pandemic this spring and were expiring this month anyway. Democrats said that Toomey was trying to limit the Fed’s ability to boost the economy, just as President-elect Joe Biden prepared to take office.
The aid agreement would deliver more than $300 billion in aid to businesses as well as the extra $300-perweek for the jobless and renewal of state benefits that would otherwise expire after Christmas. It included $600 direct payments to individuals; vaccine distribution funds; and money for renters, schools, the Postal Service and people needing food aid.