The White House said yesterday that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was “unable to find legal authority for a new, targeted eviction moratorium” and asked that states and local governments put in policies to keep renters in their homes, the Associated Press reported. Mass evictions could potentially worsen the recent spread of the COVID-19 delta variant as roughly 1.4 million households told the Census Bureau they could “very likely” be evicted from their rentals in the next two months. Another 2.2 million say they’re “somewhat likely” to be evicted. The prospect of mass evictions has led to criticism that the Biden administration was slow to address the end of the moratorium, which expired over the weekend. But the White House says that it lacks the authority to extend a national moratorium. That’s largely because the Supreme Court signaled in a 5-4 vote in late June that it wouldn’t back further extensions, with Justice Brett Kavanaugh writing that Congress would have to act to extend the moratorium. The White House noted that state-level efforts to stop evictions would spare a third of the country from evictions over the next month.
