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Nearly 40% of U.S. households said they faced serious financial difficulties in recent months of the COVID-19 pandemic, citing problems such as paying utility bills or credit card debt, according to a recent poll. About one-fifth have depleted all of their savings, the Wall Street Journal reported. U.S. households are struggling in many ways over a year into the coronavirus pandemic, according to the poll conducted by the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and National Public Radio. Nearly 60% of households earning less than $50,000 a year reported facing serious financial challenges in recent months. Of those, 30% lost all of their savings, according to the poll. The survey questioned about 3,600 adults in August and early September about a variety of potential problems during the pandemic and how the effects have continued in more recent months. In addition to financial concerns, respondents were asked about healthcare, education, child care and personal safety. The results show how the pandemic deepened an already divided economy in the U.S., with well-off people and businesses coming out the same or stronger while many lower-wage workers were thrust into financial crisis. The highly transmissible Delta variant slowed the U.S. economic recovery as businesses and consumers adjusted their plans. In late August, as the poll was being conducted, the Supreme Court lifted the federal government’s ban on evictions during the pandemic. Federal boosts to unemployment benefits expired in September, after the survey was completed. Close to 20% of those polled said their financial situation is better now than before the COVID-19 outbreak, compared with 32% who said their situation is worse. About half, 49%, said it stayed the same.

Thousands of public servants who were rejected from a student loan forgiveness program will get their cases reviewed by the Education Department as part of a new settlement in a lawsuit brought by one of the nation’s largest teachers unions, the Associated Press reported. The settlement announced on Wednesday aims to resolve a 2019 suit accusing the department of mismanaging its Public Service Loan Forgiveness program — a troubled initiative that the agency is separately working to expand through an overhaul announced last week. The suit was brought by the American Federation of Teachers on behalf of eight members who said they were wrongly denied debt cancellation through the program. Created in 2007, the program promises that college graduates who take jobs in public service can have their federal student debt forgiven after making 10 years of monthly payments. But the vast majority of applicants have been rejected, often for failing to meet complicated eligibility rules. According to the lawsuit, the Education Department routinely made errors while processing applications, yet offered no appeals process. It argued that borrowers were illegally being denied their right to due process. The suit targeted the department and former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos. As part of the settlement, the department said it will automatically review applications for all borrowers who were rejected prior to Nov. 1, 2020, as long as they had made 10 years of payments. If the department finds that a rejection was justified, it will email borrowers to explain the decision and how they can become eligible. It goes a step further than a temporary expansion announced last week, which allows some previously ineligible borrowers to get loan forgiveness if they submit an application by the end of October 2022. A separate appeals process will be created by April 30, 2022, for anyone whose application is denied. All eight plaintiffs in the suit will also get their loan balances erased, estimated at nearly $400,000.

Consumer prices jumped more than expected last month, with rent, food and furniture costs surging as a limited supply of housing and a shortage of goods stemming from supply chain troubles combined to fuel rapid inflation, the New York Times reported. The Consumer Price Index climbed 5.4 percent in September from a year earlier, faster than its 5.3 percent increase through August and above economists’ forecasts. Monthly price gains also exceeded predictions, with the index rising 0.4 percent from August to September. The figures raise the stakes for both the Federal Reserve and the White House, which are facing a longer period of rapid inflation than they had expected and may soon come under pressure to act to ensure the price gains don’t become a permanent fixture. On Wednesday, President Biden said his administration was doing what it could to fix supply-chain problems that have helped to produce shortages, long delivery times and rapid price increases for food, televisions, automobiles and other products. In remarks at the White House, Mr. Biden said that the Port of Los Angeles would begin operating around the clock to relieve growing backlogs and that the administration was encouraging states to license truck drivers more quickly. Companies including Walmart, FedEx and UPS are also moving to work more off-peak hours, he said. Monthly price gains have slowed from their breakneck pace earlier this year — they popped as much as 0.9 percent this summer — but they remain abnormally rapid. Tangled shipping routes have helped to push couch and table prices higher, and consumers are paying more for everyday items like meat, eggs and gasoline.

The Biden administration is overhauling a student loan forgiveness program for public service employees that had become a notorious quagmire, introducing a sweeping set of fixes on Wednesday that Education Department officials said would help more than a half-million people get closer to the relief they had been denied for years, the New York Times reported. Previous patchwork efforts to mend the program have largely failed, brought down by the same complexity that crippled the original initiative. But this time, the agency is taking a chainsaw to the program’s rules to temporarily clear the way for many people who were previously rebuffed. Created by Congress in 2007 to attract people to vital but often low-paying government and nonprofit jobs, the program offered employees a generous incentive: After 10 years of work, those who had made their federal student loan payments on time would have their remaining debt wiped away. But to many, that promise proved to be a mirage. More than 98 percent of those who applied were rejected, because of convoluted rules and sloppy administration. The most consequential shift takes aim at a rule that snared an overwhelming number of applicants: the so-called wrong loan problem. When Congress enacted the forgiveness program, it limited eligibility to those with student loans made directly by the government. Since 2010, all federal student loans have been made and owned directly by the Education Department. But before 2010, most borrowers had government-backed bank loans known as Federal Family Education Loans. Hundreds of thousands of borrowers working in public service jobs made payments on those loans for years without realizing — because loan servicers often failed to tell them — that those payments would not count toward the 120 monthly payments they needed to rack up to have their loan forgiven. The Education Department had long resisted giving borrowers credit for those payments, insisting it lacked the authority to do so. But now, it is offering a limited waiver that will retroactively count those payments, which will benefit around 550,000 borrowers, the department said. Some 22,000 of those borrowers will automatically have debts totaling $1.7 billion wiped out because of the program changes, the agency said. That exceeds the 16,000 borrowers who have managed to get their debts forgiven through the program to date.

The Treasury Department yesterday announced plans to start reallocating the billions of dollars in federal rental assistance in a bid to get more money into the hands of tenants facing eviction, the Associated Press reported. The move, which was required by Congress when it allocated the monies, follows the slow distribution of rental assistance in many parts of the country. A little more than 16.5% of the tens of billions of dollars in federal assistance reached tenants in August, compared with 11% a month earlier. Lawmakers have approved $46.5 billion in spending on rental assistance and Treasury is targeting the first tranche of money known as ERA1 which amounts to $25 billion. States and cities are mostly allocating ERA1 money, which must be spent by Sept. 30, 2022. Allocation of the second installment of $21.5 billion, can go through through Sept. 30, 2025. The goal, Treasury officials said, is to reallocate money from those programs either don’t need it or don’t have the desire to set up a program.

The Senate voted 50 to 48 to confirm Rohit Chopra to be the next director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, after months of uncertainty for the Biden administration, the Washington Post reported. The vote on Chopra to be the CFPB director was along party lines. Chopra, who served as a Democratic commissioner on the Federal Trade Commission, has drawn opposition from free-market conservatives wary of supporting an “anti-business” regulator. Chopra, 39, would serve a five-year term at the helm of the federal consumer watchdog. He has a long history with the CFPB, which was created in the aftermath of the financial crisis of 2007 to 2008. He worked closely with Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) on establishing the bureau, then joined it in 2011 to investigate industry abuses in the student lending market. He later became assistant director and then student loan ombudsman, where he developed a reputation for targeting private student loan servicers for what he called their mistreatment of borrowers, helping lay the foundation for President Barack Obama’s Student Aid Bill of Rights.