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.
Anurag Arjun is co-founder of Avail, a modular blockchain infrastructure project spun out from Polygon. He previously co-founded Matic Network (now Polygon) and serves on the board of rootVX, an enterprise tokenization studio focused on building regulated digital infrastructure for assets, payments and data. With a background in research, economics and engineering, Anurag brings deep cross-disciplinary expertise to financial technology and modular blockchain design.
Anupam Gupta is chief product officer at Applied Systems Inc. He is responsible for the company's product vision and product management teams. Formerly CPO at 4C Insights, a sophisticated Data & Analytics SaaS provider to the AdTech/MarTech industries, which was acquired by Mediaocean, the mission-critical platform for omnichannel advertising with more than $200 billion in annualized media spend managed through its software, connecting the ecosystem of agencies, brands, media, technology, and data. As CPO of the combined companies, he spearheaded their product transformation to the cloud, adding new products fueled by data and intelligence infused in the core workflow. Previously, he led product organizations for several tech companies, including at Vubiquity, Mixpo, and Microsoft among others.
“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.