What more can the president do? All he can do is "ask for" it - it is the congress that handles the money. Not to mention, I see no support for Perlstein's "distributed" claim in the article he linked (the word "distributed" does not appear in the article)
As far as "what can the President do," I feel pretty confident that, if he thought the process was dragging along more slowly than he liked, he could do something about it. Not just this President. Any President.