The Senate voted 96-0 Wednesday night to approve a $2 trillion relief package to battle the COVID-19 pandemic and its economic fallout.
The House of Representatives will vote Friday on the measure, according to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) President Donald Trump is expected to sign the measure soon afterward.
This would mark Congress’ third legislative relief measure to address the spread of novel coronavirus 2019, which as of Thursday morning was reported to have killed more than 1,000 people in the United States.
The package includes provisions for federal agencies to offer employees of their contractors and subcontractors paid leave up to an average of 40 hours per week in order to keep workforces “in a ready state” through Sept. 30. This is reserved for vendor employees who cannot perform their work because a federally owned or leased site has closed down or restricted access because of the novel coronavirus.
These are individuals whose occupation does not lend itself to working remotely, from people employed in environmental remediation at radioactive waste sites to employees in classified settings.
The Energy Department’s Office of Environmental Management each year receives billions of dollars to oversee cleanup of 16 nuclear sites, with thousands of contract and subcontract employees conducting the work. Meanwhile, national laboratories managed under DOE’s semiautonomous National Nuclear Security Administration handle sensitive data on U.S. nuclear security.
The Energy Facilities Contractors Group (EFCOG), representing dozens of companies in the DOE complex, pushed to ensure the stimulus package included such relief for prime contractors and subcontractors. One industry source familiar with the effort said vendors around are reviewing the language, but that it appears to cover at least a “portion” of their concerns.
The stimulus package also would provide $28 million to support telework activities at the Department of Energy and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
The stimulus package was a compromise measure from separate bills introduced in the Democrat-led House and Republican-led Senate. Lawmakers from the two parties sniped at each other through the week before negotiating the deal.
The measure experienced some late turbulence, with Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and a few other Republicans objecting to unemployment benefits they considered so generous that many people might elect not to return to work after the crisis. They sought to modify the bill to eliminate the potential for someone to make more on unemployment than on the job, but the amendment did not receive enough votes to be added to the package.
Apparently in response to the GOP action, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) threatened to put a hold on the bill unless more constraints were placed on a $500 billion fund for companies, which he called corporate welfare, fund, according to major news outlets. However, he did not follow through on his threat.
