States strain to carry out Trump order
He told them to kick in 25% of extra unemployment aid
benefits, gives people an incentive to stay unemployed. The White House described the $400 level as an appropriate compromise, and top administration officials including Vice President Mike Pence on Monday urged governors in a private call to pressure Democratic lawmakers to come to a deal.
But Democrats have dismissed Trump’s executive order as a hollow political gesture — not to mention legally questionable — that could ultimately leave millions of Americans without much-needed aid. Several governors said their states simply couldn’t afford to chip in a quarter of the cost, even with the relief money previously approved by Congress.
That share would cost California $700 million a week, Gov. Gavin Newsom said Monday. The state has already allocated 75% of the money that came from an earlier congressional package.
“There is no money sitting in the piggy bank,” Newsom said. “It simply does not exist.”
As Democrats grumbled that Trump’s executive order was unworkable, top administration officials contended that Trump was taking action while House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Dcalif., and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., were sitting on the sidelines — even though the president has not taken any active role in the negotiations.
Trump also took to
Twitter on Monday to ridicule Sen. Ben Sasse, calling him a “RINO” — a Republican in name only — after the Nebraska Republican called Trump’s use of executive orders “unconstitutional slop.”
White House press secretary Kayleigh Mcenany, meanwhile, asserted that the orders were “entirely within the executive capacity of the president” and pointed to statutes she said supports the legal justification to reallocate funding in times of emergency.
Some state officials, both Democrats and Republicans, said Trump’s order could prove to be difficult to implement for technical reasons.
Andrew Stettner, senior fellow at The Century Foundation and an expert on unemployment aid, said that it could 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.