About 89% of rental aid funds not used
Local officials are being pressured to disburse cash
The $46.5 billion rental aid program created to pay rent accrued during the pandemic continues to disburse money at a slow pace, as the White House braces for a Supreme Court order that could strike down a new national moratorium on evictions.
The Emergency Rental Assistance Program, funded in the two federal pandemic relief packages passed over the past year, sputtered along in July, with just $1.7 billion being distributed by state and local governments, according to the Treasury Department, which oversees the program.
The money meted out was a modest increase from the prior month, bringing the total aid disbursed to about $5.1 billion, figures released early Wednesday showed, or roughly 11% of the cash allocated by Congress to avoid an eviction crisis that many housing experts now see as increasingly likely.
That cash was slated to be spent over three years, but White House officials who have spent months pressuring local officials and tweaking the program to make access easier had hoped states would have spent much more by now.
“About a million payments have now gone out to families it is starting to help a meaningful number of families,” said Gene Sperling, who oversees the operation of federal pandemic relief programs for President Joe Biden.
“It’s just not close to enough in an emergency like this to protect all the families who need and deserve to be protected. So there is still way more to do and to do fast,” he added.
Data released by the Census Bureau on Wednesday illustrated the magnitude of the eviction risk.
An estimated 1.2 million households are very likely to face eviction for nonpayment of rent over the next two months, according to the bureau’s periodic Pulse survey, which extrapolated national totals from a pool of about 70,000 respondents who answered a survey this month.
Of the roughly 2.8 million households that have applied for aid, only about 500,000 reported receiving assistance another 1.5 million are waiting for approvals, while nearly 700,000 have been rejected, according to the estimates.
And those are just the tenants who have tried to get access to the program: More than 60% of vulnerable renters have not even applied.
To speed things up, Treasury announced another round of changes to the program, including a directive to local officials that they allow tenants to use self-reported financial information on aid applications as a first, rather than a last, resort, while granting permission for states to send out bulk payments to landlords and utility companies in anticipation of federal payouts to tenants.
They are also expanding existing initiatives to prevent evictions at properties funded by the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Agriculture Department and the Department of Veterans Affairs.
Biden’s domestic policy staff has mapped out policy contingencies if the Supreme Court strikes down the moratorium, which is the administration’s principal safeguard for hundreds of thousands of lowincome and working-class tenants hit hardest by the pandemic. White House lawyers expect a court decision this week.
Mostly, the response will entail doubling down on existing efforts to speed up flow of the aid. But officials are likely to switch to a triage model, focusing on a handful of states and cities that have weak tenant protections, high backlogs of unpaid rent and low use of the federal rental assistance fund.
The moratorium was initially put into effect by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in September under President Donald Trump. Biden extended it several times this year but allowed it to briefly expire earlier this month. He reinstated it, in a slightly modified form, on Aug. 3 under pressure from congressional Democrats.