White House chief of staff Ron Klain said the bill reached the White House on Wednesday night, “so @POTUS is signing it today – we want to act as quickly as possible.”
Klain added: “We will have our signature celebration on Friday, as planned, with Congressional leaders!”
“As Congress signed the bill more quickly than we expected, the president will sign the American Rescue Plan today in an hour. @VP will join him in the oval. And tomorrow they will have a signing event here @WhiteHouse, “White House press secretary Jen Psaki said in a tweet.
The plan’s main features include stimulus payments of up to $ 1,400 per person that will send money to about 90% of households, a $ 300 federal increase for weekly unemployment benefits, an expansion of the child tax credit of up to $ 3,600 per child and $ 350 billion in state and local aid, as well as billions of dollars for K-12 schools to help students return to classrooms, to help small businesses hard hit by the pandemic and for research, development and vaccine distribution.
Later on Thursday, Biden will make his first prime-time speech to the nation to mark the one-year anniversary of the Covid-19 pandemic outage.
Biden’s speech will focus on the lives lost in the pandemic, the sacrifices the American people have made and define the next steps to fight the pandemic, according to a White House official. Biden will “be honest with the American people about what is still needed to defeat the virus and provide a hopeful vision of what is possible if we all come together,” said the official.
More than 529,400 Americans died from Covid-19 on Thursday afternoon, according to Johns Hopkins University.
As the Biden government increases vaccination efforts across the country, officials emphasize that Congressional funding is needed to put vaccines in the arms of all Americans. Biden’s Covid-19 aid package offers $ 14 billion for research, development, distribution, administration and confidence-building in vaccines.
More than 95.7 million doses of the Covid-19 vaccine have been administered across the country, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. There are three Covid-19 vaccines that have received emergency use authorization from the US Food and Drug Administration of Pfizer / BioNTech, Moderna and Johnson & Johnson.
CNN’s Kaitlan Collins, Clare Foran, Katie Lobosco and Tami Luhby contributed to this report.