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White House Coronavirus Talks Make Progress in Bridging Gaps - The Wall Street Journal

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House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer spoke to the media on Monday.

Photo: shawn thew/EPA/Shutterstock
By

Siobhan Hughes

and

Kristina Peterson

WASHINGTON—White House negotiators said they aim to reach a deal with Democrats on a new coronavirus-relief package by the end of the week, with both sides saying they made progress in talks to bridge differences in unemployment payments and other aid proposals.

“We’re going to try to reach an overall agreement, if we can get one, by the end of this week, so that the legislation could be then passed next week,” Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin told reporters Tuesday after meeting with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.) and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.) “Some issues we’ve been able to agree on. Some significant issues are still up.”

Democrats characterized their afternoon meeting with White House officials as a slow but productive grind, and both sides said they expected to be back at the bargaining table on Wednesday.

“We’re still slogging through step by step by step,” Mr. Schumer told reporters. “They made some concessions, which we appreciated. We made some concessions, which they appreciated. We’re still far away on a lot of the important issues, but we’re continuing to go at it.”

Neither side disclosed details of the offers that had been made on either side, or whether progress had been made on the most intractable of the issues, including aid for states and localities and how much money the federal government would provide to supplement state jobless aid.

The comments came one day after President Trump said he was considering issuing executive orders without waiting for a legislative agreement. Mr. Trump said he sees jobless assistance and avoiding evictions as the most pressing items.

“Those are the pre-eminent priority,” said White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany.

White House officials are discussing potential executive orders to suspend the payroll tax, impose limitations on evictions and restore some expired enhanced jobless benefits, people familiar with the matter said.

Senate Republicans, who have been divided over their own roughly $1 trillion aid proposal, said they were still sorting out what GOP measures the Senate might vote on this week. Republicans have been floating different ideas for how to extend at a lower rate the weekly $600 federal unemployment benefit that ended Friday. Republicans have said the $600 benefits were too generous to motivate people to return to work, but haven’t coalesced around one proposal for extending them, amid concerns within the party over further deficit spending.

Mr. Schumer said Republicans’ proposals so far fell short of the resources needed to counter the crisis.

More than 50 million Americans have filed for unemployment since the start of the pandemic, overwhelming some states. WSJ visits an unemployment processing event in Ardmore, Okla., to hear from some of the people waiting to get help with their claims. Photo: Benjamin Lindsey

“The gap between our two parties in the negotiations is about priorities and about scale,” he said on the Senate floor Tuesday. “This disease has washed over our country like a great flood, and Republicans are acting like we need to fix a leaky faucet.”

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R., Ky.) said Democrats were talking up progress in their negotiations without being willing to make any compromises.

“It’s like they expect applause for merely keeping a civil tone with the president’s team—never mind they’re still obstructing any action,” Mr. McConnell said on the Senate floor Tuesday. “Not a dime for kids, jobs and health care unless the administration will let them check off every left-wing lobbyist’s Christmas list five months early.”

With talks dragging out, Senate Republicans expected that no deal would be reached this week and they were bracing to be in session next week as well, canceling the first part of their August break.

“I think there’s an impasse,” said Sen. Richard Shelby (R., Ala.), chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, coming out of a closed-door GOP lunch at which Mr. Mnuchin spoke. “Nothing’s moving.”

Republicans have accused Democrats of overplaying their hand by declining to back any temporary extension of jobless benefits, while Democrats respond that they have had a plan in place since May that extends jobless benefits at the same rate but the GOP waited to release its proposal until last week.

The federal government paid $16.4 billion in enhanced unemployment benefits for the week ended July 25, the Labor Department said. That means roughly 27 million Americans received a federal $600 payment on top of any state benefits. Economists say those payments, and other stimulus, have allowed Americans to pay their mortgage and utility bills and avoid evictions and missed payments on car loans and credit cards.

The National Multifamily Housing Council said nearly the same share of renters made payments in June, 95.9%, as they did a year earlier, when unemployment was near a 50-year low.

More

Much of the discussion Monday focused on how much funding should go to schools and what proportion of that should go to those that reopen for in-person learning, a Democratic aide said. Democrats are pushing for more overall funding and for less of it to be tied to reopening, arguing that schools that are conducting remote learning have comparable expenses.

Last week Democrats stopped an effort from GOP Sens. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin and Mike Braun of Indiana to pass narrow legislation extending federal unemployment insurance through the end of the year. Under their bill, states could either give unemployed workers a flat $200 weekly sum or an amount of no more than $500 that, when combined with state benefits, would be equivalent to two-thirds of a person’s lost wages.

Democrats also blocked an effort from Sen. Martha McSally (R., Ariz.) to extend the $600 weekly benefits for seven days. Mr. Schumer called it a stunt and said it couldn’t be implemented in time to prevent lapses.

Republicans later stopped Democrats’ efforts to pass a $3.5 trillion coronavirus-aid package approved by the Democratic-led House in May. That bill would extend the $600 supplement to state unemployment benefits through January.

The battle over federal unemployment insurance is only one of the thorny issues bedeviling lawmakers and the White House as they try to hash out the next aid package. They are also at loggerheads over whether to provide aid to financially strapped states and localities, how much money to allocate for controlling the virus, reopening schools and whether to increase food stamp benefits, among others.

Mr. Trump told reporters at the White House on Monday that he is considering issuing executive orders to help people affected by the pandemic, including taking steps to prevent people from being evicted from their homes. He also said he was open to taking executive action to suspend the collection of the payroll tax, an idea Republicans and Democrats in Congress had rejected and didn’t include in their proposals.

—Eric Morath and Andrew Restuccia contributed to this article.

Corrections & Amplifications
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R., Ky.) said Democrats were aiming to “check off every left-wing lobbyist’s Christmas list five months early.” An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated the time period in the quote as five weeks. (Corrected on Aug. 4)

Write to Siobhan Hughes at siobhan.hughes@wsj.com and Kristina Peterson at kristina.peterson@wsj.com

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