A second federal comprehensive stimulus bill by Friday is Senator Charles Grassley’s hope. He shares his top three things that he thinks need to be addressed this week include unemployment and rent assistance, “We need to get this unemployment thing settled, so we’re going to continue to help people with more money than they get from state unemployment. But we can’t continue to help at $600 because the federal government’s paying people more to work than if they were working and it’s just difficult for employers to get workers. And Iowa is always short of workers, so this just makes it worse. Secondly, we’re going to have people evicted from their homes and we’ve had a moratorium on evictions and we ought to help those people that need it with some monetary help for rent.” His third item is funding for schools, “And thirdly, we’ve got in Iowa and other places in the country, K-12 opening up and we need to get some help for the schools opening up their schools and make it a safe place. And this money would be used to make the schools a safer place for the kids to be. Those three things aren’t the only thing that I want in the bill, but those things would be things that need to be done right now and then leave the rest of the stuff until September.”

In addition, he says people would again see $1,200 per adult and $500 per child, as they did in April, with the addition of dependent adults and college age children.

Grassley said he’d also support funds for 501c6 organizations like chambers of commerce and economic development to help businesses with recovery efforts. As well as, additional funding he said would be in the neighborhood of $25 billion for additional contact tracing and testing for COVID-19.

Elected officials in Washington D.C. are continuing talks this week in regard to the next emergency aid package. The Senate is scheduled to leave for an August recess at the end of the week until Labor Day.