Trump Won’t Sign the COVID Relief Bill. Those Suffering Can’t Wait.

Millions are being punished for the president’s anger with Congress.

Saul Loeb/Getty

The coronavirus is a rapidly developing news story, so some of the content in this article might be out of date. Check out our most recent coverage of the coronavirus crisis, and subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily newsletter.

On Saturday night, President Donald Trump failed to sign the $900 billion coronavirus relief bill extending key provisions from the CARES Act. The consequences are immediate and many: an at least temporary lapse of unemployment benefits, the loss of the $300 unemployment federal bonus for this coming week (that the bill planned to roll out), and another looming government shutdown. The bill included vaccine distribution money, emergency rent assistance, and small business aid. As my colleague Hannah Levintova reported, when the COVID-19 relief bill passed the Senate, the unemployment measures alone would keep nearly 5 million from falling into poverty in January 2021.

Despite the $600 stimulus checks being negotiated by Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, Trump criticized the amount for being too little and called on Congress to cut “pork” from the measure. Democrats happily joined Trump in attempting to bump the checks to $2000. But the new measure failed in the House.

This morning, Republicans have urged Trump to sign it on talk shows. “You don’t get everything you want, even if you’re the president of the United States,” said Senator Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania. But the money is still waiting, in limbo.

In the meantime, millions will suffer. What are the consequences of a lag in this aid? “Foreclosures, hunger, homelessness, suicide,” Michele Evermore, a senior policy analyst for the National Employment Law Project, told the New York Times.

But let us take this from the abstract.

For Rockie McMahan, the last day of unemployment relief was dolled out on Christmas Day, according to reporting by the Texas Tribune earlier this week. “I’m flat broke,” said the Amarillo, Texas woman, who was sleeping in her 2007 Ford Fusion. In Austin, Texas, another woman told a local TV station that she is down to her last $100. “I lost so much weight because I don’t eat. I can’t afford nothing,” a woman in San Antonio said to the Tribune.

In the next few months, tens of millions face potential eviction. An Ohio woman, Jo Marie Hernandez told USA Today she and her child “can’t wait a few weeks for help. We’re starving and will be out on the street soon.” According to data collected in a national survey by the Census Bureau, over 6 million Americans fear eviction or foreclosure is somewhat to very likely. In North Carolina, Washington D.C., and South Dakota, this number is highest—around 50 percent are worried about not making rent. In Arkansas, over 15 percent of households said they did not have enough food over the last seven days. Over 80 million say it has been difficult to pay basic household expenses. Food banks, and organizations that track hunger, say that over 50 million will have experienced food insecurity by the end of this year. Just last week, over a million Americans filed new unemployment claims.

On December 23, the New York Times reported that Nicole Craig spent the last $7 in her bank account on tinsel for a small tree for her child’s first Christmas.

“I’m really afraid of what’s going to happen,” she said, worried that the pandemic relief wouldn’t be coming.

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate