Pelosi dismisses talk of White House compromise on stimulus: They ‘keep moving the goal post’

Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) is dismissing talk that the White House has compromised during COVID-19 stimulus talks, saying administration officials “keep moving the goal post.”

Pelosi told CNN’s “State of the Union” that the administration has not moved closer to Democrats’ goals in the stimulus agreements.

{mosads}“They haven’t yet,” the Speaker told CNN’s Jake Tapper. “They keep moving the goal post.”

She said she is “hoping” to get a reply from Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin on Monday about a list of concerns she sent on Friday.

Tapper asked Pelosi whether a stimulus deal would be possible before the 2020 election. She previously said legislation for a package would have had to be completed by the end of last week to get it done in time. 

“I’ll never give up hope,” she said on Sunday. “I’m optimistic. We put pen to paper and have been writing the bill based on what we hope will be the outcome, what they said they would get back to us on.”

“We have to act,” she said. “To do anything though that does not crush the virus is really official malfeasance. And to crush the virus we just have to follow the science: testing, tracing, treatment, mask-wearing, ventilation, separation and the rest.”

Cases in the U.S. are spiking just more than a week before Election Day, with a record for 85,085 new cases identified in a single day on Friday, according to The New York Times.

The U.S. has confirmed more than 8.5 million COVID-19 cases since the beginning of the pandemic and 224,906 related deaths, according to Johns Hopkins University.