WASHINGTON—Today, the Senate will take a procedural vote on a coronavirus relief package. Joel Griffith, research fellow at The Heritage Foundation, released the following:

Millions of Americans are still in desperate situations in the wake of the coronavirus outbreak, and Congress has the chance to implement meaningful, responsible measures to provide relief. However, if Congress wants to help Americans hit the hardest, it needs to narrowly tailor these relief measures to the health crisis and provide necessary legal protections to ramp up the ongoing economic recovery, not counterproductive stimulus measures. Policymakers should carefully target any coronavirus-related relief beyond the already $4 trillion in authorized spending.

 

The most recent, scaled-back GOP proposal rightly leaves out misguided bailouts of irresponsible state governments, blanket 'stimulus' checks to nearly every American, and an extension of federally mandated eviction moratoriums.The bill also includes important liability protections for businesses and schools working to reopen in good faith and scales back the poorly-targeted and unjust federal unemployment supplements.

 

Although an improvement over competing proposals, significant concerns remain. Instead of empowering states and families’ education decisions, it increases the federal government’s role in education through a new tax program and more-than doubling federal K-12 education spending. The bill still includes unnecessary Postal Service bailouts, fails to gradually ratchet down additional unemployment benefits, increases wasteful farm subsidies, and fails to properly target small business loan forgiveness.