WASHINGTON — The Biden administration’s efforts to sell Americans and members of Congress on the president’s $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief package are accelerating, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said Friday. 

Psaki said members of the administration have reached out to governors, state governments, Black civic groups, and anti-hunger and nutrition advocates in recent days to make their pitch. Vice President Kamala Harris, meanwhile, has done a number of local media interviews. 

“These conversations are, of course, critical to building support and moving the president’s bill forward,” Psaki said.

Perhaps the most important group President Joe Biden needs to win over is congressional Republicans, many of whom believe the package’s price tag is too high. 

Psaki, however, cited a Monmouth University poll this week that showed that 71% of Americans, including 41% of Republicans, want the GOP to work with Biden on a deal. 

“I think a fair question you might ask our GOP, our Republican colleagues, is why they oppose proposals that have the support of 71% of the American public,” Psaki said.

Speaking from the Oval Office on Friday, Biden and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen called for swift action on the relief bill.

"The choice couldn't be clearer," Biden said. "We have learned from past crises that the risk is not doing too much. The risk is not doing enough. And this is a time to act now." 

"There is an overwhelming consensus among economists — left, right and center — that this is a unique moment in this crisis, and the cost of inaction is high and is growing every day," he added.

“The president is absolutely right. The price of doing nothing is much higher than the price of doing something, and doing something big," Yellen said, pointing to unemployment data released a day earlier. "We need to act now, and the benefits of acting now and acting big will far outweigh the costs in the long run."

Despite Biden's calls for unity, Democrats said the stubbornly high unemployment numbers and battered U.S. economy leave them unwilling to waste time courting Republican support that might not materialize. They also don't want to curb the size and scope of a package that they say will provide desperately needed money to distribute the vaccine, reopen schools and send cash to American households and businesses.

Biden has been appealing directly to Republican and Democratic lawmakers while signaling his priority to press ahead.

“We've got a lot to do, and the first thing we’ve got to do is get this COVID package passed,” Biden said Thursday in the Oval Office.

The standoff over Biden's first legislative priority is turning the new rescue plan into a political test — of his new administration, of Democratic control of Congress and of the role of Republicans in a post-Trump political landscape.

Success would give Biden a signature accomplishment in his first 100 days in office, unleashing $400 billion to expand vaccinations and to reopen schools, $1,400 direct payments to households, and other priorities, including a gradual increase in the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour. Failure would be a high-profile setback early in his presidency.

Democrats in the House and Senate are operating as though they know they are borrowed time. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi are laying the groundwork to start the go-it-alone approach as soon as next week.

They are drafting a budget reconciliation bill that would start the process to pass the relief package with a simple 51-vote Senate majority — rather than the 60-vote threshold typically needed in the Senate to advance legislation. The goal would be passage by March, when jobless benefits, housing assistance and other aid is set to expire.

Psaki said Biden is focused on having conversations aimed at gaining bipartisan support, but added that his “end goal” is “delivering relief to the American people, not the parliamentary procedures."

“We can’t image that the one in seven families who are hungry or the thousands who’ve lost a loved one to COVID care about the procedure, either," she said.

Senate Republicans in a bipartisan group warned their colleagues in a “frank” conversation late Wednesday that Biden and Democrats are making a mistake by loading up the aid bill with other priorities and jamming it through Congress without their support, according to a person familiar with the matter who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the private session.

Sen. Rob Portman (R-OH), a former White House budget director under George W. Bush, wants a deeper accounting of what funds remain from the $900 billion coronavirus aid package from December.

“Literally, the money has not gone out the door,” he said. “I’m not sure I understand why there’s a grave emergency right now.”

Biden spoke directly with Republican Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, who is leading the bipartisan effort with Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) that is racing to strike a compromise.

Collins said she and the president had a “good conversation.”

“We both expressed our shared belief that it is possible for the Senate to work in a bipartisan way to get things done for the people of this country," she said.

The emerging debate is highly reminiscent of the partisan divide over the 2009 financial rescue in the early months of the Obama administration, when Biden was vice president, echoing those battles over the appropriate level of government intervention.

Psaki was pressed on why Biden hasn’t traveled around the country pitching his plan to Americans, like Obama did in 2009. She said the president’s “preference would be to get on a plane and fly all around the country” but that COVID-19 concerns have prevented him from holding public events. She didn’t rule out future travel, but it would likely not involve crowds.

In the meantime, Psaki said the Biden administration is having to get creative about its outreach, which included Harris’ interviews this week with media in states such as Arizona and West Virginia.

The vice president "was making those calls because we want to make the case to the American people across the country, and obviously she’s not traveling to those states and holding big events or even events with not big crowds but some crowd,” Psaki said. “And so this was a way to do exactly that.”

On Thursday, more than 120 economists and policymakers signed a letter in support of Biden’s package, saying the $900 billion that Congress approved in December before he took office was “too little and too late to address the enormity of the deteriorating situation.”

Employers shed workers in December, retail sales have slumped and COVID-19 deaths kept rising. More than 430,000 people in the U.S. have died from the coronavirus as of Thursday.

At the same time, the number of Americans applying for unemployment benefits remained at a historically high 847,000 last week, and a new report said the U.S. economy shrunk by an alarming 3.5% last year.

“The risks of going too small dramatically outweigh the risks of going too big,” said Gene Sperling, a former director of the White House National Economic Council, who signed the letter.

The government reported Thursday that the economy showed dangerous signs of stalling in the final three months of last year, ultimately shrinking in size by 3.5% for the whole of 2020 — the sharpest downturn since the demobilization that followed the end of World War II.

The decline was not as severe as initially feared, largely because the government has steered roughly $4 trillion in aid, an unprecedented emergency expenditure, to keep millions of Americans housed, fed, employed and able to pay down debt and build savings amid the crisis.

GOP allies touted the 4% annualized growth during the last quarter, with economic analyst Stephen Moore calling the gains “amazing.”

Republicans have also raised concerns about adding to the deficit, which skyrocketed in the Trump administration.

Republican Sen. John Barrasso of Wyoming, the third-ranking party leader, said Biden should stick to the call for unity he outlined in his inaugural address, particularly with the evenly split Senate. “If there’s ever been a mandate to move to the middle, it's this,” he said. “It's not let’s just go off the cliff.”

But Democrats argue that low interest rates make the debt manageable and that the possibility of returning to work will do more to improve people’s well-being.