Trump's Order On 'Unemployment Benefits' Is A Big Mess
President Donald Trump announced over the weekend that if Congress wouldn’t extend the $600 enhanced unemployment insurance, he would do something himself.
“I’m taking action to provide an additional or an extra $400 per week in expanded benefits,” Trump said Saturday at his golf club in New Jersey.
But $400 is not $600, which is what the benefit was until it expired at the end of July. And it turns out the extra $400 is actually just $300, unless states feel like adding another $100. And the money isn’t technically an unemployment benefit, possibly because it’s legally dubious. And it could take weeks for states to deliver.
The president’s memorandum tells governors they can apply to set up a brand-new “lost wages assistance program” through the Federal Emergency Management Agency. The program would operate in tandem with state unemployment systems, some of which took weeks and months to deliver federal benefits earlier this year.
If any laid-off workers watching the president’s news conference over the weekend thought they were about to get paid, they might wind up disappointed.
“It’s setting up workers’ expectations that they’re going to get a benefit that there’s almost no way they’re going to get,” said Michele Evermore, an unemployment insurance expert with the National Employment Law Project.
The president’s announcement is partly a negotiating tactic on a broader coronavirus relief deal, as the memorandum says the new wage assistance program “shall terminate upon enactment of legislation providing” federal unemployment benefits.
A senior White House aide told HuffPost on Monday that there was “no movement” on a deal right now. “But it’s all hands on deck at Treasury and Labor to get money out to people as soon as they can,” the aide said.
In addition to the lost wages program, the president also ordered the Treasury Department to defer payroll tax withholdings, which would give...
