Some unemployment benefits — including the assistance for gig workers — are set to expire on March 14, underscoring the administration’s desire for congressional action on the stimulus package.
When Trump failed to secure a deal with lawmakers on Covid-19 relief last summer, he adopted executive actions in an effort to ease payroll tax burdens and extend jobless assistance. Those ran into implementation problems and ended up little consolation as millions saw help run out amid a partisan clash in Congress.
In contrast with Trump — who didn’t directly engage in talks with lawmakers on Covid-19 relief — Biden, along with Vice President Kamala Harris, Deese and other administration officials are planning meetings with lawmakers from both sides of the aisle in coming days, White House press secretary Jen Psaki said Thursday.
“This crisis is dire and it requires immediate action,” Psaki said.
The president is asking the Labor Department to issue guidance clarifying that workers can refuse employment that jeopardizes their health and still receive unemployment benefits. That could help service-industry and factory workers worried about the spread of the coronavirus at their job to stay home from work.
Biden will also ask the Department of Agriculture to issue new guidance that would allow as many as 12 million additional Americans to have access to food-stamp benefits that were enhanced during the pandemic. The president will also ask the department to make it easier for families to access a program providing benefits to children who would normally qualify for free school lunches, and increase the benefit by 15%.
And Biden will request that the Treasury Department create new online tools to help the estimated 8 million Americans who have not yet received the coronavirus stimulus checks to which they’re entitled.
Biden will ask the Department of Veterans Affairs to halt collections on overpayments and debts, in a move the administration says could help as many as 2 million veterans. Early in the pandemic, the VA halted collection for unpaid copay charges for medical care and prescriptions as well as pre-existing debts, but the department resumed collection at the beginning of the new year.
Elsewhere, Biden is rescinding a trio of Trump executive orders that made it easier to fire federal workers and imposed time limits on collective bargaining negotiations. The new president’s order directs federal agencies to bargain with federal workers when union contracts expire.
Biden is also eliminating Trump’s move to create a “Schedule F” classification for federal employees, which would have made it easier to hire and fire high-level civil servants. Democrats complained that the Trump administration sought the change to make it easier to embed political allies in the upper tiers of the civil service.
The executive order also directs the administration to begin work on an executive order mandating federal contractors pay a $15 an hour minimum wage, and asks departments and agencies to develop recommendations about how they can increase pay for federal workers making below that amount.