One under-appreciated reason COVID negotiations are a mess that I heard brought up reporting this story is that -- unlike other countries -- we don't have any national plan on COVID to build them around. https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/coronavirus-surges-countries-spend-more-economic-aid-not-u-s-n1250411

So if you're in Germany or the UK or Canada you can say "Our national plan is to close these kinds of businesses under these conditions in order to achieve this specific goal." Then you can say, here's aid for those businesses and those workers for that time period.

But we don't just lack a national plan, we have different plans in open war with each other. You have WH Task Force calling for certain businesses to stay fully or partly closed, but Trump often demanding they open and workers return. So it's harder to explain where aid goes.

If our actual articulated national plan was "We are going to open schools by closing bars, restricting indoor dining, and compensating workers in affected industries like hospitality until they can safely reopen." you could craft benefits around it.

If it was "While cases are soaring, people who can't safely work should stay home temporarily and businesses that can't safely function should stay closed temporarily" then you could craft temporary benefits around those goals. But we don't have a plan.

It's not even clear the plan is to PREVENT people from getting infected at all. Trump has urged people to go about their lives, said it's no big deal, and empowered a fringe Fox News commentator who has promoted herd immunity. In which case aid actually goes AGAINST their plan.

So you end up w/ gibberish from top to bottom, which has been the story since the first days of the pandemic. And it blows up policy at every level, since states don't have federal aid to enact their own plans and Senate/House GOP don't have direction from the top to break logjam

All of this is even more ridiculous now, because we have vaccines coming on a somewhat predictable timeline. If ever there was an easy time to design a plan, this would be it! You can see elements of a vaccine-based timeline in the bipartisan deal, but that's just some senators.