» Cash-strapped states told to chip in for jobless benefits.
‘Unrealistic’ executive order demands they pay for a quarter of unemployment benefits
For weeks, America’s states have been counting on Congress to come through with hundreds of billions of dollars of aid to help them with a financial avalanche set off by the nation’s economic collapse.
Instead, with some Senate Republicans balking at another round of federal stimulus and negotiations in shambles, President Donald Trump added another burden. In an executive order on Saturday, he extended $400 per week in additional unemployment benefits — but is asking states to foot a quarter of the bill.
“It’s completely unrealistic,” said Josh Bivens, director of research for the Economic Policy Institute, a progressive think tank in Washington. “States need a lot more money from the federal government. They don’t need new demands to pay money. They’re already in the hole.”
On the front lines of fighting the coronavirus since the Trump administration ceded much of the responsibility to the states, governments are being hit hard by the economic shutdowns ordered to contain it.
With more than 16 million people relying on unemployment benefits, nearly a dozen states — including New York, California, and Texas — have already exhausted their trust funds and borrowed almost $20 billion from the U.S. Treasury to cover their share of the checks.
Sales taxes have tumbled by the most on record, and income taxes are eroding, too. All told, the pandemic may leave states with budget shortfalls of $555 billion through 2022, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. State and local governments have already laid off more than a million workers since
far more than they let go in the years that followed the Great Recession and illustrating how severely their spending cuts may slow the economic recovery.
Andrew Stettner, senior fellow at The Century Foundation and an expert on unemployment aid, said that it could also take several weeks for jobless claimants to see the enhanced benefit given the states’ difficulties in updating their unemployment systems.
“No one’s getting a payment from this in August. If they’re lucky, they’ll get it in September,” he said.
The $44 billion that the Trump administration has set aside for the unemployment aid would run out in five or six weeks, Stettner added.
State unemployment agencies struggled badly this spring and summer under the crush of tens of millions of applications, and in most cases took weeks to implement the extra $600 payment after it was first approved.
The Texas Workforce Commission, which oversees the state’s unemployment system, declined to comment on when the state would be able to roll out the additional relief. “We are currently reviewing the presidential memoranda and will provide additional information as soon as it becomes available,” said Cisco Gamez, a spokesperson for the TWC.
Democrats included an additional $1 trillion in direct aid to states and municipalities in the stimulus bill that passed the U.S. House. The one proposed by Senate Republicans didn’t include any new funds for them, however, and Trump has sought to cast such aid as a giveaway to Democratic strongholds, even though the financial toll is being felt nationwide.
With talks at loggerheads, Trump resorted to executive action to replace some of the $600a-week federal unemployment benefit that lapsed. Yet it may be challenged in court as an unconstitutional encroachment on Congress’s power to allocate funds, and it’s also unclear how many states are in a position to opt in if a rival stimulus plan isn’t struck.
Eric Kim, head of state government ratings at Fitch Ratings, said the White House executive order allocating $44 billion in federal disaster funding to cover those benefits implies that states electing to opt in would need to come up with $14 billion to $15 billion.
“Twenty-five percent is a lot of money for states, particularly for something they have not been paying for at all right now,” he said in a statement Monday.
The White House said states could tap into the $150 billion allocated for coronavirus relief in the March stimulus bill, saying more than $80 billion of it is still available.
But that figure has been disputed by the National Governors Association, the National ConferMarch, ence of State Legislatures and five other bipartisan state and local government groups. They said it fails to recognize that the funds have already been earmarked for other expenses in their annual budgets, even if it hasn’t yet been spent.
Dan White, director of public sector research at Moody’s Analytics, said that he doesn’t see the proposal as feasible for cashstrapped states. He also said the federal government should be looking to help them financially, given that governments will be forced to either cut spending or raise taxes to balance their budgets — the “opposite” of what would foster economic recovery.
“That’s going to counteract all the things the federal government is doing,” he said.
Trump’s unemployment plan was rebuked by Democratic governors. California’s Gavin Newsom called the order “absurd” on Twitter. New Jersey’s Phil Murphy was incredulous at a Trenton news conference Monday.
“States are going broke and millions of Americans are unemployed, yet the solution calls for states to create a new program we can’t afford to begin with,” Murphy said.
Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine, a Republican, said he’s unsure whether his state can afford to pay its share.
“We have set some money aside, a significant amount of money, for testing. Testing is going to be very, very important.” DeWine said, adding he’s “reviewing this issue.” Meanwhile, he urged Congress to “get back in and negotiate.”