House Passes $900 Billion Covid-19 Relief Package

Under the deal reached Sunday evening, Congress is expected to approve another round of direct checks of $600 per adult and $600 per child, add $300 to weekly unemployment payments for 11 weeks and extend two other unemployment programs, supply more than $300 billion in relief for small businesses, including a second round of the Paycheck Protection Program, and pour more than $50 billion into distributing coronavirus vaccines, as well as testing and tracing efforts.

The bill heads now to the Senate, where lawmakers said it would pass with strong bipartisan support. President Trump is expected to later sign the bill into law.

“We are going to pass another historic rescue package to help American families through this pandemic,” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R., Ky.) said on the Senate floor Monday. “None of us think any of this legislation is perfect. But a big, bipartisan majority of us recognize the incredible amount of good it will do when we send it on to the president’s desk.

The votes marked the final resolution of a bitter, monthslong fight as lawmakers wrestled with how to respond to the virus as it upended the economy and daily existence for the entire country. Even the negotiations that produced the final agreement were transformed by the pandemic, as lawmakers dug into policy disputes over Zoom meetings and conference calls.

The bill wasn’t expected to face resistance from senators seeking to block it from coming to the floor, although some Republicans said they would vote against it.

Sen. Rand Paul (R., Ky. ) said he opposed the infusion of money into the economy, arguing that it was fiscally reckless.

“It’s clear that government has worsened the economic damage and acted as the biggest obstacle to economic recovery,” Mr. Paul said on the Senate floor Monday. “The answer is not printing up and distributing ‘free money.’ It’s opening the economy.”

But Democrats said the relief package, whose size was surpassed only by the stimulus bill Congress passed in March, was insufficient to meet the country’s needs.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.) and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.) said they would press to pass more assistance next year, when President-elect Joe Biden is in office. In an effort to find common ground, congressional leaders agreed to drop both funding for state and local governments, which Democrats had sought, as well as liability protections for entities operating during the pandemic, a top GOP priority.

“The bill today is a good bill. Today is a good day. But it is certainly not the end of the story, and it cannot be the end of the story,” Mr. Schumer said on the Senate floor Monday. “Anyone who thinks this bill is enough doesn’t know what’s going on in America.”

Mr. Biden praised the bipartisan agreement Sunday night, but said it wouldn’t be enough to get the country back on its feet.

“This action in the lame duck session is just the beginning. Our work is far from over,” Mr. Biden said.

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said Monday the first batch of payments could go out at the beginning of next week.

”We couldn’t be more pleased,” Mr. Mnuchin told CNBC Monday. “It took us too long to get here.”

Monday’s votes will cap a long, difficult legislative struggle to craft an aid package that both parties could support. Months of intense negotiations between Democratic leaders and top White House officials ended in an impasse before the November elections. Even after a bipartisan group pieced together a framework for a $900 billion proposal this month that mirrored much of the final agreement, congressional leaders had to resolve a series of stubborn disputes, including a late-emerging disagreement over whether to restrict the Federal Reserve’s emergency lending powers next year.

Mr. Schumer reached a deal late Saturday with Sen. Pat Toomey (R., Pa.), who had pushed to curtail the Fed’s powers, clearing the way for Sunday’s final agreement.

The relief package will set up a second round of stimulus payments to individuals that will be smaller than the $1,200 and $500 payments approved in the spring. The payments start phasing out when individual adjusted gross income exceeds $75,000, when head-of-household income exceeds $112,500, and when income for married couples filing jointly exceeds $150,000.

So-called mixed-status households—where some members have Social Security numbers but others don’t—would be eligible for partial payments, unlike the first round, when they were excluded. This change is retroactive, so these households can claim an amount for the first payment as part of their 2020 tax returns.

Dependents over the age of 16 wouldn’t qualify, just as in the first round of stimulus payments. That means households wouldn’t get payments for those who are college students or disabled adults.

In addition to adding $300 in unemployment benefits for 11 weeks, lawmakers extended two other unemployment programs until they begin phasing out in mid-March and end in early April. Those two programs expand the pool of people eligible for unemployment benefits and extend their duration. Lawmakers also included $1.8 billion in tax credits for businesses to provide paid leave.

Roughly $280 billion would go toward the Paycheck Protection Program, the bulk of the $325 billion the bill puts toward small businesses.

Businesses that received PPP loans would be able to deduct expenses associated with those loans. That move—urged by businesses after an extensive lobbying effort in recent weeks—would overturn a Treasury Department decision that denied the deductions.

Theater operators and owners of small performance venues would be eligible for $15 billion in grants, and the bill provides $15 billion for airline payroll support. Schools would receive $82 billion under the agreement, and $10 billion would go toward child care.

The deal includes $25 billion in rental assistance, extends a moratorium on evictions and approves $13 billion in funds for food-stamp and child-nutrition benefits.

In a response to the recent authorization of coronavirus vaccines, lawmakers agreed to increase the amount of money aimed at combating the virus, adding $30 billion for the vaccine’s procurement and distribution of a vaccine, as well as $22 billion for testing and tracing.

The White House won a tax break Mr. Trump had been seeking all year: the ability for businesses to deduct restaurant meals during 2021 and 2022. Some lawmakers had criticized the idea in part because it could encourage indoor dining that spreads the coronavirus.

The agreement would extend a tax credit for retaining employees and make it available to PPP recipients, and includes a number of other tax provisions.

The relief package excludes a priority from each party: legal protections for businesses operating during the pandemic that Republicans had sought, and direct aid for state and local governments that Democrats and some GOP lawmakers had pressed to include.

The agreement includes some new stipulations around the Federal Reserve, which in March announced lending programs to keep credit flowing to large companies and cities and states. Days later, Congress provided $454 billion for the Treasury Department to cover losses in the Fed’s lending programs.

Mr. Mnuchin last month declined to allow the programs to continue after Dec. 31, saying he didn’t think it was legally allowed. Mr. Toomey had insisted that the Fed be prevented from reviving those programs without explicit congressional approval.

Under the deal, remaining funding previously provided to the Treasury Department to backstop losses in Fed lending programs would be revoked, and the Fed wouldn’t be able to replicate identical emergency lending programs next year without congressional approval. But the Fed would retain its ability to set up similar emergency lending programs without congressional approval, which Democrats said was crucial to giving the Biden administration flexibility in bolstering the economic recovery.

—Richard Rubin contributed to this article.

Write to Kristina Peterson at [email protected] and Andrew Duehren at [email protected]