WASHINGTON — Republicans toiled on Monday to resolve their differences with President Trump over the next coronavirus relief package, working to smooth out internal divisions ahead of what promises to be an intense battle with Democrats over providing federal aid to confront a virus that continues to surge and batter the economy.
Senate Republicans and Trump administration officials were coalescing around a roughly $1 trillion package that would most likely include tax breaks, direct payments and jobless aid for Americans struggling amid the pandemic; money for schools and health care; and liability protections for employers and health providers. But the president and congressional leaders remained at odds over several ideas Mr. Trump is pushing that many Republicans oppose, including conditioning all new education funding on the resumption of in-person school, removing funding for testing and tracing efforts nationwide, and including a payroll tax cut.
The disconnect was a dysfunctional start to fraught negotiations over the pandemic aid bill, which is likely to be Congress’s last substantial opportunity before the November election to address the continuing toll of the pandemic. And it suggested that the priorities of Mr. Trump, who has sought to downplay the virus and pressed to quickly reopen the economy, have begun to diverge from those of Republicans on Capitol Hill, who are staring down a grim political landscape and regard the package as vital to their re-election prospects.
The division among Republicans further complicated what was already expected to be an intense round of negotiations on the package with Democrats, who have vowed to accept no less than the $3 trillion stimulus proposal the House approved in May. Time is of the essence, with expanded jobless aid for the tens of millions of Americans laid off during the pandemic set to expire at the end of the month.
Republicans are looking at providing an estimated $400 billion for a new round of stimulus checks to individuals, a scaled-back extension of those expanded unemployment benefits, some tax breaks for small businesses and a version of the payroll tax holiday that Mr. Trump has insisted be included, according to people familiar with the emerging plan, who described it on the condition of anonymity because it is not yet final. Such a holiday may need to be structured not as a tax cut but as a deferral of the tax collection to a future year, in order to stay inside cost constraints.
Some Republicans are pushing to condition a portion of the federal aid for schools and colleges on whether the institutions reopen in the fall, but there is little consensus on how that would be structured. While Mr. Trump wants federal money to go only to schools that “reopen” in the fall, the White House has not clarified for lawmakers how strictly it is defining the term, including whether schools would have to offer in-person instruction five days a week.
Senate Republicans are considering providing at least $70 billion for elementary and secondary schools, according to one of the people familiar with the proposal, who cautioned that the funding levels had not yet been finalized.
Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky and Representative Kevin McCarthy of California met at the White House on Monday morning with Mr. Trump and top administration officials in an effort to reconcile their priorities.
Afterward, Mr. McConnell described the forthcoming bill as neither “another multitrillion-dollar bridge loan to make up for a totally shut-down economy, nor an ordinary stimulus for a nation ready to get back to normal.”
“The need now lies somewhere in between,” he said.
The bill will represent an opening bid from Republicans, and its overall cost is almost certain to grow in negotiations with Democrats because it is likely to exclude any additional money to help state and local governments avert massive layoffs of public employees amid plunging tax revenues. The legislation will most likely include additional aid to a popular federal loan program for small businesses to help maintain payroll, albeit with more stringent restrictions, as well as aid for schools and hospitals.
Republicans are also pressing hard to include language that would force the health care industry to be transparent about how it sets prices, part of their strategy of using the coronavirus aid bill to blunt the political liability they face for opposing the Affordable Care Act.
During the meeting, Mr. Trump called the economist Arthur Laffer and put him on speakerphone, according to a person briefed on what happened. Mr. Laffer talked about the need to include the price-transparency measure, a prospect that the president appeared to like, the person said.
The focus of the aid package “is really about kids and jobs and vaccines,” Steven Mnuchin, the Treasury secretary, told reporters during the Oval Office meeting with Vice President Mike Pence and Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff. Both Mr. Mnuchin and Mr. Meadows are expected to attend the senators’ policy lunch on Tuesday when Republicans will discuss their proposal, and the two are scheduled to meet with Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California and Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and the minority leader, later in the day.
“Schools was a very big component,” Mr. Mnuchin said of discussions on Capitol Hill late Monday. “It’s a lot of money.”
At the White House, Mr. Mnuchin said the administration wanted to have a new bill signed into law before the unemployment benefits run out at the end of the month, but Congress’s plodding speed is more likely to produce a bill for Mr. Trump to sign by early August. Republicans have made it clear that they will seek to reduce the level of jobless aid provided as part of the stimulus law enacted in March, which many of them opposed given that the $600-per-week supplement amounted to more than workers in some parts of the country earned in wages.
“We’re not going to let unemployment expire — no way,” Larry Kudlow, the director of the National Economic Council, said in an interview. “But we are going to reform it a bit to deal with this issue of work incentives.”
The administration also supports an additional round of stimulus checks, though most likely to a smaller group of Americans than received checks earlier this year, along with a variety of tax credits for struggling industries like tourism and hospitality — and more sweeping tax incentives to help companies that lose money this year convert those losses more easily into tax savings.
But Republicans have rejected some of the White House’s proposals, viewing them as tone deaf given that more than 3.8 million people in the United States have been infected with the coronavirus and several states are seeing spikes in cases. In a meeting Monday evening, top Republicans raised concerns about the administration’s suggestion that the legislation eliminate billions of dollars to fund coronavirus testing and shore up federal health agencies, including a proposed $25 billion to states for conducting testing and contact tracing, as well as about $25 billion for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health. (People familiar with the suggested funding levels for the proposal repeatedly cautioned that they were not final.)
Mr. Trump also continues to press for the inclusion of a payroll tax cut, a proposal that has struggled to gain traction on Capitol Hill, calling it “very important to me.”
Mr. Trump’s advocates will probably ensure that the tax cut is “at least included in the first draft,” Senator John Thune of South Dakota, the No. 2 Senate Republican, told reporters with a laugh. “It’s all going to come down to the consensus of where the votes are, and there are a lot of Republicans who don’t like it.”
While Mr. McConnell has been adamant that Republicans, who periodically bill themselves as guardians of the national deficit, want to keep the overall cost of the package down, Republican officials involved in the talks privately acknowledge that negotiations with Democrats will most likely push the price tag as high as $2 trillion.
As in those earlier negotiations, Democratic leaders have signaled they are willing to play hardball and withhold their votes — absorbing some political attacks for doing so — until Republicans agree to their demands for additional money, as they did during the debate over the $2.2 trillion stimulus law.
“It was our unity against a partisan, Republican first draft that allowed for significant improvements to be made — improvements that have benefited millions upon millions of Americans,” Mr. Schumer wrote to colleagues Monday morning. “I hope we will not have to repeat that process. But we will stand together again if we must.”
Maggie Haberman contributed reporting.
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