The White House's calculation on coronavirus relief has proven, unsurprisingly, to have failed miserably. The apparent plan was to have chief of staff Mark Meadows be a total asshole and blow up the talks so that Trump himself could save the day with a series of executive orders. Except those four "executive orders," three of which are really just memorandums, are unworkable and inadequate. Which might be why Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin is on a campaign to restart talks and try to get something done to save the economy.
Governors immediately pushed back against the unemployment insurance proposal to cut supplementary payments to $400/week with states matching at $100 as unworkable and unaffordable. “We appreciate the White House’s proposals to provide additional solutions to address economic challenges,” the National Governors Association said in a statement released Monday. “[H]owever, we are concerned about the significant administrative burdens and costs this latest action would place on the states.”
So the White House had to back off, letting states out of the deal. Which means, at best, unemployed people will be getting half of what they were before the enhanced benefits expired. Many won't get even that—if they qualify for less than $100/week from the states, they get no federal boost. So that's bad. The other part that's bad is that, as David Dayen pointed out on Twitter, the funds that Trump is using—from the Disaster Relief Fund—legally require a 25% match from states. There's also the issue that the Disaster Relief Fund is there for other natural disasters like wildfires and hurricanes and tornadoes and violent storms, those things that happen every year from July through October.
So we're in a pretty dire mess. Bad enough to get Mnuchin out there with the message to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer: "Let's do this." On "Fox Business" Wednesday morning, he said “Let’s spend a little over a trillion dollars” now “on areas of the economy that are going to be very impactful,” he said. “If we need to do more, we'll come back and do more and work together.“ Never mind that economists have been calling for something along the lines of $10 trillion more in spending. But at least one person in the White House, Mnuchin, is aware that we're in really deep shit here as a country and maybe somebody should try to do something about it?
Or at least pretend, which is also a strong possibility. Because as of Tuesday night, Pelosi had heard nothing from him.