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Updated September 22, 2021 Reviewed by Reviewed by Michelle P. ScottMichelle P. Scott is a New York attorney with extensive experience in tax, corporate, financial, and nonprofit law, and public policy. As General Counsel, private practitioner, and Congressional counsel, she has advised financial institutions, businesses, charities, individuals, and public officials, and written and lectured extensively.
The HEROES Act was a $3 trillion stimulus bill approved by the U.S. House of Representatives in 2020. However, it stalled in the U.S. Senate, and Congress subsequently passed the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2021 in December 2020, building on aspects of the earlier CARES Act from March 2020, including extending unemployment insurance payments.
The Health and Economic Recovery Omnibus Emergency Solutions Act passed the House in May 2020 and would have provided a new round of relief spending to support the U.S. economy in the wake of the COVID-19 crisis and shutdown of wide swaths of the economy. An updated version of the bill was passed by the House on Oct. 1, 2020.
The bill was designed to extend, supplement, and build new spending programs on top of several previous bills that passed into law to address the financial issues facing the country amid the COVID-19 pandemic. At a price tag of more than $3 trillion, the House bill would have constituted the single largest piece of economic support legislation ever enacted, matching the $3 trillion in total already committed through the four different laws already passed.
Highlights of the bill include:
The HEROES Act stalled in the Senate despite passing the House.
Former President Donald Trump and former Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell expressed opposition to so much spending. The HEROES Act, which was written entirely by House Democrats and passed largely along party lines, did not move forward in the Senate.
The HEROES Act came as the unemployment rate in the U.S. was near 15%, with 20.5 million net jobs lost in April 2020.
Much of the HEROES Act reflected the content of previous standalone bills already introduced in the House, included in one omnibus package. This means the HEROES ACT included a wide range of disparate spending and regulatory measures all agglomerated together under a single bill, making the overall bill a kind of grab bag for Democratic legislative priorities.
For example, one section of the bill included the Secure And Fair Enforcement Banking Act, for the purpose of allowing cannabis-related businesses easier access to traditional banking. Another section expanded federal hate information collection, grant funding, and punishments. Yet another directed expanded federal support for LGBTQ suicide prevention.
However, despite this catch-all approach to packaging bills together under one act, the largest provisions of the HEROES Act focused on mitigating compensation for the damages imposed on the economy by the government's response to COVID-19.
The major economic provisions of the HEROES Act included direct federal assistance to state and local governments, a round of direct tax rebates to taxpayers, an extension to the previously enacted federal supplement to unemployment benefits, a federally-funded pay increase for essential workers, and direct and indirect housing assistance to consumers.
The HEROES Act appropriated $540 billion for states, territories, and tribal governments, and $375 billion for cities, counties, and other local government units. In general, these funds were to be allocated according to population based on the 2010 Census and are required to be used to mitigate unanticipated costs or lost revenues due to the epidemic or the economic damage that has resulted. State and local government entities would have also been eligible to receive funds under many of the various lesser programs funded by the Act.
The Act sought to institute another round of tax rebates similar to those implemented in the previous CARES Act but with expanded eligibility. Individual filers would have received $1,200 and joint filers $2,400, plus $1,200 per dependent up to three dependents. The benefit would have been $1,200 for a single person and up to $6,000 for a married couple with three or more children.
The rebates would have been available to all individuals other than non-resident aliens, dependents, estates, or trusts. Payments would have phased out above incomes of $75,000 for individuals, $112,500 for head-of-household, or $150,000 for joint filers at a rate of 5% of income above the threshold. The Act also looked to expand a few other tax credits, including the Earned Income Tax Credit and the Child Tax Credit. As a major benefit to high-tax states and cities, it also looked to eliminate the limit on the deduction of state and local taxes from federally-taxed income for 2020 and 2021.
The HEROES Act tried to extend the $600 per week bonus to unemployment benefits enacted under the CARES Act by six months, through the end of January 2021. This emergency supplement to unemployment benefits originally was scheduled to run through July 2020.
The HEROES Act looked to fund $180 billion in grants to essential employers to pay a higher premium wage to essential workers who worked during the crisis. It tried to raise pay for these workers by up to $13 an hour, retroactive to Jan. 27, 2020, until 60 days after the declared end of the emergency.
Total grant-funded compensation would have been limited to $10,000 for those earning less than $200,000 per year or $5,000 for those earning more than $200,000 per year. Essential government services, public health, health care providers, first responders, food industry, sanitation, waste disposal, funeral, and mortuary services, news reporting, education, laundry services, election operations, hazardous material work, dental and other health services, work directly related to COVID-19 treatment and research, and the U.S. Postal Service, are all covered as essential work for premium pay purposes.
The HEROES Act tried to put a moratorium on residential foreclosures and rental evictions for 12 months and on repossessions of motor vehicles or RVs being used as residences for six months. In turn, it directs the Treasury to make some of the loans to distressed industries authorized under the CARES Act available to provide liquidity to mortgage servicers, and it directs the Federal Reserve to establish a new low-cost credit facility for residential rental owners.
It would have provided $100 billion in new housing assistance grants for emergency assistance with rent and related living expenses for low-income households and $75 billion for grants to state housing finance agencies to provide homeowners with emergency assistance for mortgage payments, utilities, taxes, and related expenses.
The HEROES Act would have extended the scope and period of student loan forbearance established under the CARES Act. All federal and private student loans would be given forbearance through September 2021. The Treasury would pay the loans up to $10,000 per borrower during this forbearance, and $45 billion is appropriated for this purpose. After that period any amounts remaining of the $10,000 per borrower would be provided to fund student debt forgiveness.
Note that the American Rescue Plan passed by Congress and signed by President Biden in March 2021 includes a provision that student loan forgiveness issued between Jan. 1, 2021, and Dec. 31, 2025, will not be taxable to the recipient.
Subsequent bills extended the forbearance period for student loans until September 2023, after which payments will start coming due and interest again will begin to accrue.
In June 2023, President Biden announced the Saving on a Valuable Education (SAVE) plan to reduce minimum payments for some borrowers and also reduce the number of years some borrowers must make payments before loans are forgiven. The announcement was made in response to the Supreme Court ruling that Biden's previous efforts to forgive student debt were unconstitutional. Biden said the Department of Education would pursue an alternative plan to provide student debt relief, this time using the Higher Education Act as its basis.