The coronavirus global pandemic is an unprecedented public health crisis. In the House, David has been at the forefront of our nation’s response and recovery efforts. From the start, Congressman Cicilline has focused on two key objectives, saving lives, and ensuring our families, workers, and small businesses have every possible resource to help get them through this crisis.

Cicilline helped lead efforts in the House to quickly pass bipartisan relief packages, providing vital federal funding for protective equipment, testing, contact tracing, and hospitals, as well as hundreds of billions of dollars in grants and forgivable loans for small businesses, dramatically expanded unemployment benefits, and direct cash payments for millions of Americans. These efforts brought billions of dollars in federal funding to Rhode Island to help the state and our cities and towns provide needed resources to first responders, aid to renters, homeowners, and small businesses, job opportunities for Rhode Island workers displaced by COVID, and more.

This unprecedented crisis required an unprecedented federal response, and that’s why Cicilline and Congressional Democrats passed the American Rescue Plan. This historic relief package provided $1.7 billion to support Rhode Island’s recovery from the public health and economic crisis. It also provided direct cash payments to Americans, cut child poverty in half by expanding the child tax credit, extended enhanced unemployment benefits, strengthened aid for small businesses and nonprofits, and provided over $70 billion to increase vaccinations and expand testing, contact tracing, and mitigation efforts.

While David continues leading efforts in Washington to deliver COVID relief for Rhode Island, right here at home he’s hosted virtual town halls and meetings to make sure Rhode Islanders have all the information they need to access available resources, and has assisted more than two thousand constituents with their federal stimulus payments, small business support, unemployment compensation, housing aid, and more.

And, once we defeat this pandemic, David is committed to making serious structural changes to address how our country’s economic divide made this deadly disease even worse, and take whatever steps are necessary to make certain this never happens again.