House Republicans blocked Democrats’ attempt to meet President Donald Trump’s demand to pay most Americans $2,000 to help weather the coronavirus pandemic.
Republicans objected to the bill House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer sought to pass by unanimous consent Thursday to replace the $600 payments in the latest pandemic relief legislation with the $2,000 payments.
Stephanie Tilenius is an entrepreneur and "intrapreneur" who builds products, platforms and businesses from the ground up. She is the founder and CEO of Vida Health, a virtual health platform designed to treat the whole person by addressing a full range of physical and mental chronic health conditions. Before starting Vida, Stephanie led large consumer and enterprise platforms at Google, eBay and PayPal. She is on the Boards of Papa, Wish, and Seagate.
Wassia Kamon, CPA, CMA, MBA, is the vice president of finance and corporate controller at the Low Income Investment Fund. Recognized as a 2022 40 Under 40 Honoree by CPA Practice Advisor, she is a speaker and one the top corporate finance and accounting content creators on LinkedIn. Her insights on resilience and professional development have been featured in publications such as The Wall Street Journal and Strategic Finance Magazine. Reach her at wassia@theclarityblueprint.com.
Ian is the co-founder and CEO of Koffie Financial, a finsurtech platform purpose-built for the trucking and transportation industry. With insurance at its core, Koffie's instant and transparent financial services empower truckers with the modern tools and technology necessary to drive efficiency and safety. He is an entrepreneurial leader at the intersection of data, enterprise markets and geospatial analysis.
Previously Ian served as founder/CEO of Urban Mapping, a web-based mapping platform he sold to Pitney Bowes in 2015. Customers included Tableau Software, Google, Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, Kayak, IAC, CoStar Group.
He has also served in a senior role at a startup that acted as outsourced research for the financial services industry, focusing on alternative data to generate alpha for hedge funds.
He blogs on themes relating to data, the whimsical and occasional adventure travel at Post-employment.com and more about his background on LinkedIn.
Ian has an MBA from Babson College, BA from McGill University and attended high school in Ireland and France. He currently lives in Raleigh, NC.
“House and Senate Democrats have repeatedly fought for bigger checks for the American people, which House and Senate Republicans have repeatedly rejected — first, during our negotiations when they said that they would not go above $600 and now, with this act of callousness on the Floor,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said in a statement Thursday.
Democrats will try again with a roll call vote on a new bill Dec. 28, when the House also plans a vote to override Trump’s veto on the National Defense Authorization Act. Since current government spending runs out that day — and funds for the rest of the fiscal year are included in the virus relief bill Trump criticized and hasn’t signed -- the House could also pass another stopgap measure to avert a partial government shutdown.
Republicans on Thursday tried to seek unanimous consent on a measure to examine taxpayer money spent on foreign aid, but Democrats blocked that move. In his complaint Tuesday about Congress’s combined virus aid and government spending bill, Trump criticized federal resources spent on international programs, even though that spending was allocated as part of the bipartisan appropriations process.