House Passes $1.9 Trillion Covid-19 Aid Package; Biden Plans to Sign Friday

The relief bill pairs new funds for public-health measures with another dose of economic aid, offering a $1,400 check to many Americans and an extension of a $300 weekly jobless-aid supplement. It includes a one-year expansion of the child tax credit that Democrats hope to make permanent; showers money on schools, vaccine distribution efforts and state and local governments; and provides support to struggling multiemployer pensions, among other measures.

The raft of new aid has buoyed expectations about the speed of the economy’s recovery after a year of Covid-19’s spread has closed schools, placed restrictions on businesses and left more than 500,000 people in the U.S. dead. New cases, hospitalizations and deaths related to Covid-19 have dropped in recent weeks as vaccinations have ramped up.

Democrats have cast the legislation as a necessary step toward bringing the economy back to full strength after the pandemic and extending more aid to working families.

The bill “is a force for fairness and justice in America,” said House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.) on Wednesday. The package is “one of the most transformative that I have seen in my over 30 years in the Congress,” she said, comparing it to the Affordable Care Act in its importance.

Mr. Biden plans to sign the coronavirus aid bill on Friday afternoon, White House press secretary Jen Psaki said Wednesday.

Mr. Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris and key cabinet secretaries plan to spend the next coming weeks traveling around the country touting the package and explaining how the public can take advantage of its benefits, White House officials said.

Ms. Psaki said the White House is planning interviews with local media outlets as well as a digital strategy related to the bill. The president will also appoint an official to oversee the implementation of the package, Ms. Psaki said.

Republicans opposed the bill, pointing to signs of the economy’s recovery without it and attacking many of its measures as bloated or unnecessary and unrelated to the crisis.

“It includes provisions that are not targeted, that are not temporary, that are not related to Covid. And it didn’t have to be this way,” said Rep. Liz Cheney (R., Wyo.), the No. 3 House Republican. “We could have had a bill that was a fraction of the cost of this one, that could have gotten bipartisan approval and support.”

In their first major legislative effort since they took control of the White House and both chambers of Congress, Democrats largely stuck together on the broad package, reconciling demands between the party’s progressive and centrist members. The package received no Republican support in Congress, though Democrats and the Biden administration repeatedly touted public opinion polling showing its broad support: A recent Pew Research Center Survey showed 70% of Americans favor the legislation.

Many of the major planks of the bill continue or build on aid measures Congress approved in a series of bipartisan bills last year. Like in previous packages, the full direct payments will go to individuals making as much as $75,000 and married couples making as much as $150,000, and the $300 weekly jobless-aid supplement lawmakers approved in December will continue through Sept. 6. Federal unemployment benefits had been set to begin expiring on March 14, spurring lawmakers to quickly approve the package.

The legislation also provides $7.5 billion for vaccine distribution, $48 billion for testing and contact-tracing efforts, $22 billion for rental assistance, $39 billion for child care, $29 billion for the restaurant industry and more than $160 billion for schools and universities.

After a push from centrist Democrats in the Senate, lawmakers did downsize some elements of the bill. The direct payments will go to zero for individuals with incomes of $80,000 and married couples with incomes of $160,000, a faster phase-down than in previous aid packages.

Democrats in the House had initially sought to set the unemployment payments at $400 a week before the Senate amended the bill. A last-minute bid from Sen. Joe Manchin (D., W.Va.) to reduce the size of the unemployment aid brought the Senate to a standstill for nearly 12 hours last week as Democrats moved the legislation through the 50-50 chamber.

Democrats used a process called reconciliation to pass the package through Congress, allowing them to avoid the 60-vote threshold necessary for advancing most legislation in the Senate and instead approve it along party lines. Using reconciliation limited the policy provisions Democrats could include in the bill, ultimately forcing the party to drop an effort to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour as part of the bill.

But reconciliation also enabled Democrats to move forward with measures that Republicans oppose, including $350 billion in aid for state and local governments that Republicans have assailed as a political handout in excess of the budget hardships caused by the pandemic.

The bill will expand the child tax credit—increasing the benefit to $3,000 per child from $2,000, with a $600 bonus for children under age 6—make it refundable, and authorize periodic payments. Making the credit refundable will make it available to the millions of very low-income households that don’t currently receive the full credit because they don’t pay enough in taxes or earn enough income to take advantage of it. Lawmakers are expected to push to make the expansion, set to last through 2021, permanent.

Democrats will broaden eligibility for and increase the amount of subsidies for people who buy Affordable Care Act health plans in the biggest changes to the law since its passage in 2010. The additional subsidies could mean lower premium payments for almost 14 million people insured on the individual market.

Advocates say the measures—along with the direct payments, expansions of the earned-income tax credit and an extension of boosted food assistance—are projected to dramatically reduce poverty in the U.S., especially among children.

“We should expect if this bill becomes law and is well implemented, we’ll see the largest one-year reduction in child poverty not just in our nation’s history but possibly in any nation’s history,” said Indivar Dutta-Gupta, the co-executive director of the Georgetown Center on Poverty and Inequality.

The size of the package has renewed concerns among some lawmakers and experts about the growing debt burden and the risk of inflation. The series of relief bills Congress has passed since the pandemic started has increased publicly held federal debt by nearly $4.5 trillion over the past year. At $21.9 trillion as of March 1, the debt is roughly the size of the nation’s entire economic output, the highest since the aftermath of World War II.

“It’s good we passed a bill, you definitely don’t want unemployment payments to expire, but it definitely could and should have been more targeted,” said Maya MacGuineas, the president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. “The bill is larger than it had to be to fight the current economic situation.”

The bill also puts roughly $86 billion into a new program to help multiemployer pension plans. The measure would allow the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation to provide cash assistance to troubled multiemployer pension plans and ensure they continue paying benefits to retirees.

—Andrew Restuccia contributed to this article.

Write to Andrew Duehren at [email protected]