Trump says to sign executive orders to extend benefits if no deal reached with Democrats

WASHINGTON - US President Donald Trump said Friday that he will sign executive orders to extend enhanced unemployment benefits, eviction protections and a temporary payroll tax deferral if no deal is reached with Democrats over the next COVID-19 relief package.

"If Democrats continue to hold this critical relief hostage, I will act under my authority as president to get Americans the relief they need," Trump told a news conference at his golf club in the state of New Jersey.

"And what we are talking about is deferring the payroll tax for a period of months until the end of the year and I can extend it at a certain period," Trump said, adding he will also use executive actions to extend enhanced unemployment benefits through the end of the year and reinstate a federal moratorium on evictions.

The extra $600 weekly unemployment benefit for every unemployed person, which benefited nearly 30 million Americans, expired last week, as Republican and Democratic lawmakers failed to reach a deal over the next COVID-19 relief bill.

Democrats have offered to cut their 3.4-trillion-dollar relief proposal by 1 trillion dollars if Republicans would agree to increase their roughly 1-trillion-dollar package by the same amount, but were rebuffed.

"They rejected it. They said they couldn't go much above their existing 1 trillion dollars, and that was disappointing," Senate Democratic Leader Charles Schumer said Friday at a press briefing after meeting with Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows.

"We're hopeful that they will think about it and come back and tell us they're willing to meet us halfway," Schumer said, adding that executive orders are not good ways to extend benefits to US households and businesses hit by the pandemic.

"You can't do unemployment benefits in as good a way as you can legislatively. You can't do a payroll tax cut, which even their own Republicans are against, if you don't do it legislatively," he said.

Mark Zandi, chief economist of Moody's Analytics, has recently warned that the US economy is at serious risk of sliding back into recession unless Congress and the Trump administration come up with another fiscal rescue package before Congress goes on its August recess.