US President Donald Trump on Friday said he was poised to sign executive orders to extend aid to Americans facing hardship due to the COVID-19 pandemic, although negotiations continued between his administration and Democratic leaders in the US Congress on a new emergency spending bill.
“End of the week,” Trump said on the timing of when he might sign the orders. “They’re being drawn [up] by the lawyers right now.”
Yet he also said that his economic team “continues to work in good faith to reach an agreement with Democrats in Congress” on a relief package including unemployment benefits and protections against evictions.
Photo: Reuters
“If Democrats continue to hold this critical relief hostage, I will act under my authority as president to get Americans the relief they need,” Trump told a news conference at his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey.
US House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi said her party had agreed to lower the relief package size to US$2 trillion from US$3 trillion, but the White House continues to resist aid to state and local governments that economists say would be critical to avoiding a new round of layoffs.
“I’ve told them, come back when you are ready to give us a higher number,” Pelosi told reporters after an hour-long meeting with US Secretary of the Treasury Steven Mnuchin.
Trump said that his executive orders would defer payroll tax until at least the end of the year, defer student loan payments and extend an eviction moratorium.
He also said that he would extend enhanced unemployment benefits until the end of the year — a key source of contention between the White House and the Democrats.
An additional US$600 in weekly federal payments to the unemployed expired at the end of last month, and Republicans want to slash the figure.
Trump did not say how much the payments under his executive order would be .
The stalemate on the relief negotiations came as official figures showed the US economy regained 1.8 million jobs last month, a solid but unremarkable result that comes as economists say challenges to the pandemic recovery are growing.
There are just two more jobs reports before the November elections, leaving little time for Trump to show the kind of improvement that would boost his bid for a second term in the White House.
The unemployment rate fell to 10.2 percent last month from 11.1 percent in June, government data showed, still slightly worse than the nadir of the global financial crisis in October 2009.
Trump’s Democratic challenger, former US vice president Joe Biden, seized on the high joblessness to attack the president.
“My heart goes out to the more than 16 million Americans still out of work. The truth is it didn’t have to be this bad, but Donald Trump failed to act,” Biden wrote on Twitter.
More than 161,000 people have died from the pandemic in the US, nearly a quarter of the global total, as the country debates whether schools are ready to reopen in coming weeks.
The country recorded 161,358 deaths and 4.94 million cases, according to Johns Hopkins University, the highest caseload in the world, caused in part by lingering problems in making rapid testing widely available and resistance in some quarters to masks and social distancing measures.
Coronavirus deaths are rising in 23 states and cases are rising in 20 states, according to a Reuters analysis of data for the past two weeks compared with the prior two weeks.
Additional reporting by staff writer and Reuters
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