NY finally applying for $300 unemploy
Now that the federal government has blinked and will no longer make states provide funding they do not have, New York State will apply.
Budget Director Robert Mujica (left)
More than one-quarter of America’s states have qualified to pay their laid-off workers $300 a week in unemployment insurance authorized by President Trump — and New York will finally seek some of the cash, but only after a nudge from The Post.
Texas became the 14th state approved to distribute up to $44 billion in total funding from the Lost Wages Assistance program, according to a Friday afternoon announcement by the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
Laid-off workers in Arizona were already getting the coronavirus-related benefits, CNBC reported. And a dozen other states — Colorado, Idaho, Iowa, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Michigan, Missouri, Montana, New Mexico, Oklahoma and Utah — have also been approved to receive grants, according to FEMA.
New York — which leads the US in COVID-related deaths with more than 32,000 — acknowledged late Friday afternoon that it hadn’t yet applied for funding and was about to do so.
The abrupt reversal came little more than an hour after The Post published an online report exposing the situation.
But a spokesman for Gov. Cuomo insisted that the decision to apply for the funding had already been made Friday morning.
Trump authorized the federal unemployment insurance by executive order on Aug. 8 after the $600-a-week payments provided by the CARES Act expired on July 31 and Congress deadlocked on an extension plan.
Cuomo initially opposed Trump’s program as “laughable” and “impossible” when it was announced because of a requirement that states kick in $100 a week for each unemployed worker.
But that mandate was eased by the US Department of Labor on Aug. 12 to include unemployment benefits that were already being paid by states.
In a statement, New York Budget Director Robert Mujica said officials decided to reverse course despite Cuomo’s earlier assertion that, “I don’t believe the whole executive order mechanism is legal, so I think this is all an artificial construction for political reasons.”
Mujica said, “Now that the federal government has blinked and will no longer make states provide funding they do not have, New York State will apply for the Lost Wages Assistance program.”
Earlier in the day, upstate Rep. Tom Reed (R-Corning) accused Cuomo of refusing to apply for the funds because he was “prioritizing political optics over the financial needs of New Yorkers.”
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