Trump Wants U.S. to Get a Cut of TikTok Sale

By Yuval Rosenberg

No Coronavirus Relief Deal in Sight, but
Faint Signs of Progress

Negotiations on the next round of coronavirus relief
continued Tuesday afternoon, and Democratic leaders emerged
sounding more positive on the state of the talks.

"They made some concessions, which we appreciated. We made
some concessions, which they appreciated. We’re still far
away on a lot of the important issues but we’re continuing,"
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY)
told reporters after meeting with House Speaker
Nancy Pelosi, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and White House
Chief of Staff Mark Meadows. He did not detail those
concessions.

Looking for a deal this week: Mnuchin
and Meadows
reportedly characterized Tuesday’s talks as the
most productive yet. Mnuchin reportedly offered Democrats a few new
proposals. He told reporters after that negotiators agreed they’d
like to strike a deal by the end of this week so that both the
House and Senate could vote on a package next week.

But, but, but: That doesn’t mean the
two sides are anywhere close to an actual deal. The Washington
Post’s Erica
Werner described the state of the talks this way:
"Pelosi’s comment after the latest Meadows/Mnuchin mtg — ‘We agree
that we want to have an agreement’ — actually constitutes a sign of
progress." So yeah, there’s a long way to go.

White House still eyeing executive orders:
With talks progressing slowly if at all, frustrated White
House officials reportedly were still considering three executive
orders aimed at providing some relief and prodding negotiations
along.

"The three actions under consideration would delay the
collection of federal payroll taxes, reinstitute an expired
eviction moratorium, and in the riskiest gambit of them all, extend
enhanced federal unemployment benefits using unspent money already
appropriated by Congress," Politico’s Jake Sherman and John
Bresnahan
reported Tuesday.

Meadows reportedly implied that the executive orders
wouldn’t be needed if bipartisan talks progressed. And CNN’s Phil
Mattingly
suggests that the possibility of issuing executive
orders won’t win the White House much leverage in talks since it’s
"not a threat anyone on the Hill takes seriously."

Trump Wants U.S. Treasury to Get a Cut of TikTok Sale

President Trump said Monday that he would allow an
American company to acquire the video app TikTok, but that any deal
would have to include a "substantial amount of money" going to the
U.S. Treasury.

Microsoft is looking to buy the app, reportedly used by
some 100 million Americans, from Chinese company ByteDance. Trump
said he will
ban TikTok if it doesn't find an American buyer by
September 15.

"The U.S. should get a very large percentage of that
price, because we’re making it possible," Trump told reporters. He
compared the payment to "key money," or cash paid by a prospective
tenant to secure a lease from a landlord. The White House wouldn’t
say how the administration could force either party in any deal to
pay the Treasury, or how such a payment would work, the Financial
Times
reports.

Trump and others have expressed national security concerns
over the app, suggesting that it could pose
data privacy and censorship risks because of its
Chinese ownership and the influence of the Chinese Communist Party.
TikTok has pushed back against those claims and security experts
have said the risks the app poses are
less direct than politicians have
suggested.

In a
blog post over the weekend, Microsoft said it
"fully appreciates the importance of addressing the President’s
concerns. It is committed to acquiring TikTok subject to a complete
security review and providing proper economic benefits to the
United States, including the United States Treasury."

Why it matters: Trump’s requirement is
highly unusual, Gene Kimmelman, a former chief counsel for the
Department of Justice's Antitrust Division and currently a senior
adviser to the policy group Public Knowledge,
told CNN: "It's not unheard of for transactions to
have broader geopolitical implications between countries, but it's
quite remarkable to think about some kind of money being on the
table in connection with a transaction."

Others put it more bluntly. "This is akin to extortion —
the sort of thing you'd expect to hear on a wiretap, not from the
White House in front of reporters," Axios’s Dan Primack writes. He
adds that there’s still no guarantee any deal will get done by
Trump’s deadline, let alone one that meets his stated terms. "If
not," Primack says, "he'll either have to ban a service beloved by
tens of millions of voters, less than two months before the
election, or kick the can down the road."

Number of the Day: $2 Trillion

The Treasury Department said
Monday that it expects to borrow another $2 trillion over the
second half of this year, including $947 billion from July through
September and $1.216 trillion from October through December. Those
estimates would raise total borrowing for fiscal year 2020, which
runs through September, to $4.5 trillion, more than triple last
year’s level. The estimates also assume that Congress will pass
another round of coronavirus relief requiring $1 trillion in
additional borrowing through the end of the calendar
year.

Second Wave of Layoffs Underway: Report

Nearly one in three workers who had returned to their jobs
after being laid off due to the coronavirus have lost their jobs
again, according to a new
survey released Tuesday by researchers at Cornell
University.

The survey, conducted from July 23 to August 1, found that
31% of workers who had stopped working at some point during the
Covid-19 shutdown and been rehired reported that they had been laid
off again. Another 26% had been told that they were in danger of
being laid off again.

"Official and private sectors jobs data have not yet
picked up the significant share of American workers that have
already been re-laid off,"
said Danielle Goldfarb of RIWI, the research firm
that conducted the survey.

The job losses may be driven by the exhaustion of federal
aid — including funds from the Paycheck Protection Program, which
provides forgivable loans to help small businesses keep employees
on payroll — rather than the resurgence of the virus, the
researchers said, since there was little difference in the results
between states that had controlled the virus and those that had
not.

Trump Extends National Guard Deployment to Fight Coronavirus,
but Reduces Funding

Responding to requests from numerous governors, President
Trump has extended the federal deployment of the National Guard to
help states respond to the coronavirus. However, as part of the
extension, states will have to start covering 25% of the cost of
the deployments.

About 25,000 members of the National Guard serving in the
states will continue to receive federal pay and benefits while
performing a variety of essential tasks, including building
temporary hospitals, operating test sites and assisting with food
distribution. States will have to cover some of the tab from August
22 until December 31, when the extension ends.

While the governors are no doubt relieved by the
extension, some state and federal officials are concerned about the
reduced funding and cost-sharing requirement, coming as it does
during an economic crisis that has caused state tax collections to
plunge. "States are being asked to bear significant costs while
simultaneously facing an historic decline in revenues," Casey
Katims, director of federal affairs for the state of Washington,

told Politico. "It is incumbent on Congress to
deliver sorely needed resources to state and local governments on
the front lines of this crisis."

Officials also complained about the last-minute timing of
the White House decision. In the absence of an announcement last
week, some National Guard troops had already started heading back
to their bases in preparation for a two-week quarantine before
returning home. Now, it could take several weeks to reestablish
their missions, and in the meantime the essential services they
provide may be available only on a limited basis.

Opinion of the Day: GOP May Be Ready to Forget Trump

Conservative New York Times columnist Ross Douthat writes
that the internal Republican debates over the next round of
coronavirus relief illustrate that many in the GOP are ready to
pretend that the Trump era never happened:

"These debates are somewhat mystifying if you believe that
the party has been remade in Trump’s populist image, or
alternatively if you just believe that the G.O.P. is full of cynics
who attack deficits under Democrats but happily spend whatever it
takes to stay in power. Neither theory explains the Republican
determination to dramatically underbid the Democrats on relief
spending three months before an election, nor the emergence of a
faction within the Senate Republicans that doesn’t want to spend
more money on relief at all.

"But these developments are easier to understand if you
see the Republican Senate, in what feels like the twilight of the
Trump presidency, instinctively returning to its pre-Trump battle
lines. The anti-relief faction, with its sudden warnings about
deficits, is eager to revive the Tea Party spirit, and its would-be
leaders are ur-Tea Partyers like Rand Paul and Ted Cruz. The
faction that wants to spend less than the Democrats but ultimately
wants to strike a deal is playing the same
beleaguered-establishmentarian role that John Boehner and Mitch
McConnell played in the pre-Trump party — and of course McConnell
is still leading it. And the fact that neither approach seems
responsive to the actual crisis unfolding in America right now
doesn’t matter: The old Tea Party-establishment battle — a battle
over whether to cut a deal at all, more than what should
be in it — is still the Republican comfort zone, and the
opportunity to slip back into that groove is just too tempting to
resist."


Read the full column at The New York Times.

For-Profit Nursing Homes Accused of Fraud Got Millions in
Coronavirus Aid: Report

For-profit nursing home operators who have faced federal
lawsuits over charges including improper billing and substandard
care have received millions of dollars in coronavirus relief funds,
according to an analysis by The Washington Post.

Looking over the last few years, the Post’s Debbie
Cenziper, Joel Jacobs and Shawn Mulcahy report that nursing homes
accused of Medicare fraud had received more than $300 million in
coronavirus relief payments. Millions more were sent to facilities
that experienced severe problems during the early days of the
pandemic, including nursing homes in the Northeast that recorded
high numbers of deaths.


Read the full analysis here.

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