WASHINGTON — President-elect Barack Obama urged Congress on Sunday to move quickly on a stimulus package to calm what he called the worst recession since the Great Depression.
"We can't afford three, four, five, six more months where we're losing half a million jobs per month. And the estimates are that if we don't do anything, we could see 4 million jobs lost this year," Obama said during an appearance on ABC's "This Week."
The president-elect is looking for Congress to pass what soon could wind up being a $1-trillion package of direct spending and tax cuts. If it doesn't, he said, "Then Congress is going to hear from me."
Senate Democrats spent Sunday afternoon meeting with Lawrence H. Summers, Obama's top economic advisor, to discuss the shape and details of the stimulus package as well as how $350 billion from the Troubled Assets Relief Program would be administered.
Lawmakers said they appreciated that the incoming administration was interested in their ideas and called the discussion "constructive" and "nonconfrontational."
"It was a free exchange of ideas back and forth," said Sen. Ben Nelson (D-Neb.).
Many senators have angrily complained that TARP -- which is intended to strengthen the financial sector -- lacked safeguards against mismanagement of funds.
"This administration will have to deal with skepticism thanks to the failures of the last administration," said Sen. Kent Conrad (D-N.D.).
A spokesman for the Obama transition said they had no announcement about when a final stimulus package would be introduced on Capitol Hill.
During the Obama interview, which was taped Saturday, the president-elect acknowledged that he couldn't do everything he promised during the campaign, at least not right away, because of the economic quagmire.
"Our challenge is going to be identifying what works and putting more money into that, eliminating things that don't work, and making things that we have more efficient," he said. "Not everything that we talked about during the campaign are we going to be able to do on the pace we had hoped."
In particular, he said, he was unlikely to close the Guantanamo Bay detention center in the first 100 days of his presidency.
"It is more difficult than I think a lot of people realize -- and we are going to get it done -- but part of the challenge . . . is that you have a bunch of folks that have been detained, many of whom . . . may be very dangerous, who have not been put on trial or have not gone through some adjudication," Obama said.
