(Reuters) – When Congress passed a pandemic relief bill on Monday, Meghan Meyer, a single mother from Lincoln, Nebraska, thought she would get some rest from the daily struggle to feed and house her two children during unprecedented health – and economic crisis.
But the next day, President Donald Trump declared the long-awaited aid package “a disgrace” and said he would not sign it into law, disapproving of some of his spending measures while demanding that it include larger stimulus controls for most Americans.
By the weekend, he had refused to give in.
That leaves Meyer, who has been on unpaid sick leave since May from her job as a customer service agent at retailer TJ Maxx because she is at risk for severe COVID, facing a financial precipice. She is one of approximately 14 million Americans whose emergency unemployment benefits, introduced by Congress when the pandemic broke in March, ended on Saturday.
“I don’t know what I’m going to do,” Meyer, 39, told Reuters in a phone interview. To hit 2020, Meyer said she had to rely on friends and charities to put food on the table, pay her rent, cover the family dog’s medical costs, and buy Christmas presents for her children.
“I’ve held up and held up,” she said.
The new emergency law would continue through mid-March programs supporting the self-employed and the unemployed for more than half a year. It also gives an additional $ 300 per week to everyone on unemployment benefits, some 20.3 million people, through mid-March. And it extends a moratorium on evictions through January that expires on December 31 and provides $ 25 billion in rental emergency relief.
Many economists agree that aid is insufficient and more will be needed after Democratic President-elect Joe Biden takes office on January 20. Biden has called the bill a “down payment.”
Negotiated by Trump’s own Treasury Secretary, Steven Mnuchin, and Republican Party congressional leaders, the bill has been flown to the president’s Florida beach resort where he will be staying for the vacation, pending his possible signing. In tweets on Saturday, Trump said he was still unwilling to sign the bill, despite pleas from lawmakers to show goodwill at Christmas.
“I just want to get our amazing people $ 2,000, instead of the meager $ 600,” he tweeted Saturday, referring to the bill’s stimulus controls, while also continuing to protest the November election for making unfounded claims about electoral fraud.
Trump had not criticized the terms of the aid package before it went to vote in the House of Representatives and the Senate.
As pandemic lockdowns hammered the economy in March, Congress rushed through emergency unemployment benefits as part of the $ 2 trillion CARES Act. At the time, lawmakers didn’t think the aid would be needed after Christmas, and until last weekend they couldn’t strike a deal to extend the benefits.
Meyer, like others, has seen her benefit decline over the past six months after a CARES program that earned her $ 600 a week in supplemental unemployment benefits expired in July and she used up her Pandemic Emergency Unemployment Compensation benefit.
That gave her extended benefits of just $ 154 a week until Saturday, which would add up to $ 454 if Trump admits and signs the bill. If he doesn’t, Meyer will get nothing.
“It’s the difference between whether we have enough groceries or not, whether I can afford my car insurance, whether I can get gasoline to go to a food bank,” she said.
Meyer said she voted for Trump in 2016 but was quickly turned off by his conduct during his tenure, describing his opposition to the aid package as “ petty. ”
SQUEEZE FOR GROWTH
Job growth in the US has slowed after an initial recovery when stay-at-home orders were lifted in the summer, and a new wave of coronavirus infections now threatens to slow the recovery.
Andrew Stettner, a senior fellow at the impartial think tank The Century Foundation, said delaying aid will slow recovery even if most Americans are vaccinated and life returns to normal by 2021.
“If you don’t let this money circulate in the economy, it will put pressure on things,” said Stettner.
Like Meyer, most people who are no longer eligible for federal unemployment benefits will have no income at all, as most states provide meager aid, he said.
About 9 million Americans who wouldn’t normally qualify for unemployment insurance, including the self-employed and gig workers, received Pandemic Unemployment Assistance (PUA) until it expired, along with other CARES programs on Saturday, Stettner said.
Among them is artist Marji Rawson, 54, from Ann Arbor, Michigan, who in a normal year would run a booth at art festivals around the country. Those festivals may not return until June, but Rawson will lose about $ 150 a week from Saturday to PUA she relied on during the pandemic.
“As if this world isn’t full of fear yet, now we’ve got this on top,” Rawson said.
Reporting by Simon Lewis; Editing by Mary Milliken, Michelle Price and Leslie Adler