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Two weeks have passed since President Trump announced that he would sidestep a congressional stalemate to deliver $400 in extra weekly benefits to tens of millions of unemployed Americans — a short-term fix meant to replace the $600-a-week emergency federal supplement that expired last month, the New York Times reported. Since then, as more details of the plan — known as Lost Wages Assistance — have emerged, so have problems with finding the funding and getting it to the hands of those who need it. What is now clear is that the federal supplement is $300 a week, not $400. And by Thursday, only one state, Arizona, had started paying out. The federal government is offering an extra $300 a week to unemployed workers. Trump is using money from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which normally provides disaster relief. The additional $100 was supposed to be supplied by states, but most are struggling to meet other expenses. Tax revenues have been sinking at the same time that costs — like precautions to curb the spread of the coronavirus — have soared. Ultimately the administration said that the states’ basic benefit payments could be counted toward their $100 share. Montana is the only state so far to choose the $400 option, according to FEMA. Jobless workers with the smallest benefits will not get the supplement. Only people who qualify to receive at least $100 in unemployment benefits each week — either through the regular state program or a federal pandemic assistance program — are eligible for the extra federal funds. In Colorado, for example, the rule leaves out 6 percent of those receiving unemployment pay — or roughly 28,000 people, said Cher Haavind, deputy executive director of the state Department of Labor.

A new study released by the government’s watchdog the Government Accountability Office (GAO) has found that long wait times for appeals for disability claims had disastrous impacts for those in need of disability benefits from the Social Security Administration. Over 100,000 people died while waiting for their appeal, while roughly 50,000 had to file for bankruptcy, YahooFinance.com reported. The report comes at a time of “heightened risk” to “worsening medical and financial conditions,” the GAO says, for Americans living with disabilities due to the coronavirus pandemic. The report’s findings could indicate troubling times ahead for the millions who might need disability benefits. Roughly 10 million people receive disability benefits, according to the SSA Annual Statistical Report. The majority of disability benefits went to disabled workers — 87 percent of all beneficiaries. In December of 2018, payments to disabled beneficiaries totaled almost $11.6 billion. As part of this analysis the GAO examined wait times and outcomes during the fiscal years 2014 to 2019. They examined applicants for disability benefits who appealed Social Security Administration’s (SSA) decision to deny benefits or only partly award benefits they applied for. The study found that most people who filed an appeal “waited more than 1 year for a final decision on their claim.” According to the analysis of SSA data, wait times spiked from 561 days on average in 2010 to nearly 840 days on average in 2015. The study says this wait time followed an increase of disability claims subsequent to the Great Recession, which could prove worrisome given the COVID-19 pandemic. 

A recent post by New York Federal Reserve researchers in the Liberty Street Economics blog examined if areas that are more financially distressed were affected by COVID-19 to a greater extent than other areas. The researchers used county-level data, on numbers of cases and deaths, compiled by the New York Times and the New York City Department of Health (Department of Health) for our analysis. For measures of financial health, they used the New York Fed’s Consumer Credit Panel (CCP), a nationally representative sample of Equifax credit report data. Our data set for this analysis includes roughly 1 percent of the nation’s adults with credit records in anonymized form. "We have seen that there is a strong relationship between COVID-19 cases and pre-COVID delinquency rates at the county level and this correlation cannot be easily explained by some known sources of heterogeneity in COVID-19, such as income, minority status, and population density," according the the New York Fed researchers. "This suggests that the harms from COVID-19 — the loss of life and health, the decline in employment, the destruction of businesses and the surge in medical expenses — will fall on counties particularly ill-suited to bearing them."