Within the next 24 hours, the House is expected to vote for a second and final time on the $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief package before sending it to President Biden’s desk to be signed into law. Once Biden signs the bill, the IRS will start sending out the new round of $1,400 stimulus checks as quickly as possible, and in order to ensure that the process goes as smoothly as it can, the president is making one tiny change from the last two rounds.
“We’re doing everything in our power to expedite the payments and not delay them, which is why [Biden’s] name will not appear on the memo line of this round of stimulus checks,” White House press secretary Jen Psaki said during a press briefing on Tuesday. “The checks will be signed by a career official at the Bureau of Fiscal Service. This is not about [Biden], this is about the American people getting relief — almost 160 million of them.”
The question from CNN’s Kaitlan Collins about Biden’s name appearing on the stimulus checks was in reference to former President Donald Trump’s decision to put his name on the checks that were delivered to millions of Americans during the last two rounds of direct payments. Last April, senior IRS officials told The Washington Post that adding his name to the checks would delay the payments by a few days, but the IRS then sent out a statement which said “these payments are going out on schedule, as planned, without delay, to the nation.”
Psaki wasn’t willing to commit to a specific date for when the $1,400 stimulus checks will start going out, but it’s worth noting that the first $600 payments of last year’s $900 billion relief package were deposited into the bank accounts of eligible Americans just three days after President Trump signed the bill into law.
One of the main differences between the latest round of payments and the previous two rounds will be the number of Americans who will receive money from the federal government. While individuals earning up to $75,000 and couples earning up to $150,000 will receive the full $1,400, the checks will phase out faster this time around. Individuals that earned more than $80,000 and couples that earned over $160,000 will not receive any money.
