Yeah, the set of EOs - well, one EO and three "memorandums" - are pretty crummy. See them
here,
here,
here, and
here. Also, skip sec. 1 for each of them if you wish to avoid vapid blather and go straight to the actual actions. (The one exception to this rule is in the unemployment one, as sec. 1 unpacks the DRF and CRF acronyms.)
In short, most of these are asking officials to try to do various things, while carefully noting in the last section for each to please not break any laws while trying. This boils down to:
- Attempt to defer student loan payments for the rest of the calendar year. I think this could work for gov't loans; I'm less sure how private loans would be affected.
- Try to prevent evictions, real hard-like. And try to use unspecified federal funds to do this.
- Defer payroll tax payments from September through the end of the year. as MrRoboto75 notes, this is just a delay and not relief, though Trump has claimed he'll get rid of it if elected. Note that Social Security and Medicare get a good deal, if not the vast majority, of their funding via this tax. So, uh, good luck with the consequences of that.
- Use existing disaster relief funds (DRF) to help people through unemployment help, with the major caveat that states will need to cover 25% of the cost. States are already facing massive revenue shortfalls and facing major fiscal problems - and they can't really run deficits like the federal government can.
- States should really use existing CARES money (CRF) to help out. Turns out congress wrote the CARES relief fund for states with a major problem - that it can't cover existing budgets, but only new budget items. But most coronavirus response is really within existing budgets, it's just that there's no more revenue to pay for it - so many states can't get the money even though they need it. Trying to fit that money into a new unemployment coverage might actually work in that it'd let states actually access the fund, but the amount of CRF each state gets is probably not large enough to do much. And they might have to fire the people who would be administering it, as those employees are 'existing budget' that the CRF can't help with.
- Try to do other stuff to help unemployed people, guys under me the president.
Now the really pernicious part about this - and something that Trump is already clued into, unfortunately - is that bringing a legal challenge against likely-illegal actions taken pursuant to these 'orders' will be perceived as trying to block aid to the people. And so I'm a little doubtful Dems (or others, apart from maybe certain libertarians/originalists) will actually challenge it. Which, in turn, will further erode the limitations of executive power like we've seen over the past couple of decades with the expanding reach of the 'War on Terror'.
I guess in short I'm pretty worried about where this will go. There's a decent chance little or unbalanced aid may come from this (e.g. certain red states embrace it), few challenge the authority of it, and Trump still gets the veneer of 'taking strong action' while this country's institutions take another step toward complete dysfunction.
As to congressional dynamics, the biggest problem is that McConnell's Senate Republicans are fractured. Roughly 20 (or so I hear) are vowing to vote against
any new spending, which means he'll have to work with Democrats to pass something while simultaneously placating Mr. President. House Democrats are negotiating with a shifting and mercurial White House in the meanwhile, so McConnell's not going to stick his neck out until those negotiations go somewhere. Edit: this is not to say McConnell hasn't been / isn't being terrible in other ways related to this ongoing saga, just noting the current rock-and-hard-place he's put himself into.
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