The administration called the current pandemic relief bill, which cleared both chambers of Congress after months of contentious negotiations, a disgrace and an embarrassment due to the $600 direct payments, which are half of what they were in the CARES Act, according to Bloomberg. The White House instead said the payments should be a much more generous $2,000 instead. While the presient did not explicitly threaten to veto the bill, the demand has nonetheless thrown what had been thought of as a done deal into chaos.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) welcomed the administration's support for the measure and urged pressure on congressional Republicans to get behind the idea too, if this indeed is the new position. She has put forward a bill that would amend the current package to include the $2,000 payments, but it would require every House member's support to pass.

Republicans, meanwhile, have found themselves in somewhat of a bind, because many didn't even like the idea of the $600 payments in Monday's bill, let alone $2,000. Increasing payments in this way boosts the bill's cost by $482 billion rather than the $164 billion in the current package, a price that Republicans will likely find hard to swallow. At the same time, they're hesitant to critique the White House too strongly, out of fear of angering their base.

MarketWatch noted, though, that the administration's main procedural leverage is the possibility of a veto, but given the amount of votes the bill passed with, Congress could probably just override it. Doing so, however, could possibly trigger a government shutdown, as the measure was embedded in the larger appropriations bill, and it could delay the distribution of jobless benefits, said CNBC.