US President Joe Biden has announced two executive orders on Friday including one related to raising the minimum wage to USD 15 for the federal workforce and the other focused on expanding food assistance and delivering stimulus checks to very low-income Americans.
Biden said that the job losses are mounting and the government needs to act.
"Today I'm signing an executive order that directs the whole of government, a whole government effort to help millions of Americans who are badly hurting. It requires all federal agencies to do what they can do to provide relief to families, small business and communities, and in the days ahead I expect agencies to act," CNN quoted Biden as saying.
"A lot of America is hurting. The virus is surging. We're 400,000 dead, expected to reach well over 600,000. Families are going hungry. People are at risk of being evicted. Job losses are mounting again. We need to act. No matter how you look at it, we need to act," the President said.
In remarks before he signed the orders, the President listed many of the financial troubles facing Americans, including that 1 in 7 households -- more than 1 in 5 Black and Latino families -- say they don't have enough food to eat, 14 million Americans have fallen behind on their rent and 900,000 people filed for unemployment for the first time last week.
"This cannot be who we are as a country," he said. "These are not the values of our nation. We cannot, will not let people go hungry. We can let people get evicted because of nothing they did themselves. We cannot watch people lose their jobs. We have to act," he added.
"If we act now, we'll be better able to compete with the world. If we act now we'll be better able to meet our moral obligations to one another as Americans," the US President said.
( With inputs from ANI )
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