Pace of pandemic aid: $43,000 every second

Agencies to devise ways of distributing $1.9T

To pay out his coronavirus relief package, President Joe Biden must spend an average of $3.7 billion every day for the rest of this year. That’s $43,000 every second of every day until midnight chimes on 2022.

For the amount of time that readers took to reach this sentence, Biden needs to disburse nearly $800,000 to stay on track.

That’s according to Congressional Budget Office estimates, and even then, the Biden administration would still have plenty of the $1.9 trillion to spend in later years as a vaccinated country battles back to economic health.

The president signed the aid package into law Thursday without a comprehensive plan in place to distribute all of the funds, which will be a focus of the administration in coming weeks.

“It’s taxpayer money that you want to put out fairly, but you also want to put out fast,” said Jack Smalligan, a senior policy fellow at the Urban Institute and a former White House budget official.

Some spending, such as cash transfers, can occur at speed.

The Biden administration already announced that it will send the $1,400 in direct checks — a total of about $400 billion — starting this weekend. The administration also will continue the enhanced jobless aid for the 20.1 million Americans who are collecting some form of the benefits.

Both the direct checks and jobless aid were part of past COVID aid packages that totaled roughly $4 trillion, meaning the government has systems in place to distribute the money.

But other elements are trickier. There is $130 billion for K-12 schools to hire teachers, upgrade ventilation systems and make other improvements so that in-person classes can resume. Universities are eligible for $40 billion.

Separately, $30 billion in housing aid is available. And there is about $120 billion for vaccine distribution and coronavirus testing, among other public health expenses.

The White House said the billions for schools would “begin” to be distributed this month by the Education Department.

But some funds could take time to distribute because government agencies with their normal spending can take six to nine months to release funds through competitive grants or an application process.

The Treasury Department is planning how to distribute roughly $350 billion in state and local aid. But it hasn’t finalized a plan and is consulting governors, mayors and other officials.

The Biden package also introduces about $140 billion in temporary tax credits. That includes an expanded child tax credit that would pay out monthly, rather than once a year.

“The real troubles are going to show up in these new tax credit programs: Can the IRS administer this new monthly payment to tens of millions of American families?” said Douglas Holtz-eakin, president of the center-right American Action Forum and a former director of the Congressional Budget Office.

Holtz-eakin said the error rates on tax credit programs tend to be high because people move to new addresses, earnings change and the IRS might not have the correct ages for children. He noted that about a quarter of payments for the existing earned income tax credit that go to working parents are in error.

But he also noted that there are few economic risks to Biden in terms of how the money gets released, as the economy was already poised to expand swiftly at the strongest rate in at least two decades.