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    How Tech Is Helping Poor People Get Government Aid

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    Even as the government expanded aid programs, many people faced barriers to using them. That problem is now being addressed with apps and streamlined websites.WASHINGTON — In making his case that safety net programs should be easier to use, Jimmy Chen, a tech entrepreneur, recalled visiting a welfare office where people on food stamps endured long waits to submit routine paperwork.They passed the time as people in lines do, staring at their phones — which had the potential to do the work online with greater convenience, accuracy and speed.The image of aid-seekers wasting time with a solution literally in hand captures what critics call an overlooked challenge for people in poverty: Administrative burdens make benefits hard to obtain and tax the time and emotional resources of those who need help.“Too much bureaucracy prevents people from getting the help they need,” said Mr. Chen, whose start-up, Propel, offers a free app that five million households now use to manage their food stamp benefits.Barriers to aid are as old as aid itself, and they exist for reasons as varied as concerns about fraud, the bureaucratic tension between accuracy and speed, and hostility toward people in need. But the perils of red tape have drawn new attention since the coronavirus pandemic left millions of Americans seeking government help, many for the first time.The government approved vast increases in spending but often struggled to deliver the assistance. While some programs reached most households quickly (stimulus checks), others buckled under soaring demand (unemployment benefits) or daunting complexity (emergency rental aid).“The pandemic highlighted how difficult these programs can be to access,” said Pamela Herd, a professor at Georgetown and an author, with Donald P. Moynihan, of “Administrative Burden,” which argues that excessive bureaucracy deepens poverty and inequality.The share of eligible people receiving benefits varies greatly by program: It is about 82 percent for food stamps, 78 percent for the earned-income tax credit and 24 percent for Temporary Assistance to Needy Families, or cash welfare, according to government estimates. That means billions of dollars go unclaimed.On his first day in office, President Biden issued an executive order asking agencies to identify “systemic barriers in accessing benefits,” with the results due in January.Shaped by forces as diverse as the tech revolution, welfare rights and behavioral psychology, the movement to create a more user-friendly safety net was underway before the pandemic underscored the perils of bureaucracy.Code for America, a nonprofit group, spent years devising a portal that makes it easier for Californians to apply for food stamps. Civilla, a Detroit-based nonprofit, helped Michigan shrink its 42-page application by 60 percent.In an age of ambitious social movements, the cry of civic tech — power to the portals — may seem obscure, but Mr. Chen, 34, says democratizing technology’s rewards is essential to social justice.“For someone like me, a phone is like a magic wand,” he said. “If I want to call a cab, there’s an app; if I want to book a hotel, there’s an app; if I want to get a date, there’s an app. It’s just incredibly unfair that we don’t apply more of this sophisticated knowledge to the problems of lower-income Americans.”Among those drawn to the app — recently renamed Providers, from Fresh EBT — is Kimberly Wilson, a single mother in Spindale, N.C., who has a 7-year-old son and cleans vacation rental homes. With her work interrupted by the pandemic, she turned to food stamps, which is also known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP.Kimberly Wilson, a single mother in Spindale, N.C., said the app’s most appealing feature is that it gives her the ability to check her food stamp balance.Mike Belleme for The New York TimesWhat Ms. Wilson said she likes most about the SNAP app is the ability to instantly check her balance, which she does almost daily. “It’s a comfort knowing I’m going to be able to feed my kid,” she said.The app also explains the timing and amounts of her payments better than the state, she said, and it steered her to a broadband subsidy that saved $50 a month.But the app’s rewards transcend the particulars, Ms. Wilson said: It leaves her feeling respected.“It makes you feel like it’s normal to need help,” she said, which is especially welcome because she has relatives who post memes depicting people on SNAP as lazy and overfed. “It’s like somebody behind the screen is looking out for us. You feel like they care.”Andrea Young, a Providers user in Charlotte, N.C., goes as far as to say the app “makes us feel like we’re Americans, too.”Propel offers an account that can also receive paychecks and other government benefits with the same balance-checking features, in recognition that most low-income households have multiple sources of income and need stable banking.PropelWith 42 million Americans receiving SNAP, many conservatives dispute the notion that aid is elusive. They see dependency as a greater concern than red tape and argue that administrative contact serves important goals, like deterring people who do not really need help or letting caseworkers encourage the jobless to find work.“The system should be striving to help individuals achieve self-sufficiency through employment” rather than maximize benefits, said Jason Turner, who runs the Secretaries Innovation Group, which advises conservative states on aid policy. “When you pile benefit on top of benefit, you make it harder to break free.”Poverty has long been linked to oppressive bureaucracy. “Little Dorrit,” the 1857 novel by Charles Dickens, lampoons the omnipotent “Department of Circumlocution,” whose stupefying procedures keep the heroine down. The 1975 documentary film “Welfare” offers a modern parallel with footage that one critic called “unbearable in its depictions of frustration and anger” among caseworkers and clients.Sometimes barriers to aid are created deliberately. When Florida’s unemployment system proved unresponsive at the start of the pandemic, Gov. Ron DeSantis told CBS Miami last year that his predecessor’s administration devised it to drive people away. “It was, ‘Let’s put as many kind of pointless roadblocks along the way, so people just say, oh, the hell with it, I’m not going to do that,’” he said. (Mr. DeSantis and his predecessor, Rick Scott, are both Republicans.)Other programs are hindered by inadequate staffing and technology simply because the poor people they serve lack political clout. Historically, administrative hurdles have been tools of racial discrimination. And federal oversight can instill caution because states risk greater penalties for aiding the ineligible than failing to help those who qualify.To show that Michigan’s application was overly complex, Civilla essentially turned to theater, walking officials through an exhibit with fake clients and piped-in office sounds meant to trace an application’s bureaucratic journey. Working with the state, the company created a new application with 80 percent fewer words; the firm is now working in Missouri.Michael Brennan, Civilla’s co-founder, emphasized that the Michigan work was bipartisan — it began under a Republican governor and continued under a Democrat — and saves time for the client and the state.“Change is possible,” he said.With its California portal, Code for America cut the time it took to apply for food stamps by three-quarters or more. The portal was optimized for mobile phones, which is how many poor people use the internet, and it offers chat functions in English, Spanish and Chinese. In counties with the technology, applications increased by 11 percent, while elsewhere the number fell slightly.During the pandemic, Code for America built portals to help poor households claim stimulus checks and the expanded child tax credit. The latter alone delivered nearly $400 million. David Newville, who oversaw the work, quoted a colleague to explain why web design matters: “Implementation is justice.”Mr. Chen, right, and Propel’s chief operating officer, Jeff Kaiser, at the company’s office in Brooklyn. Propel has landed investments from the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz and the sports stars Kevin Durant and Serena Williams.Karsten Moran for The New York TimesAs the son of struggling immigrants from China, Mr. Chen, the founder of Propel, understood hardship before he understood technology. “There wasn’t always enough to eat” in an otherwise happy Kansas City childhood, he said. (The family did not receive SNAP, though Mr. Chen does not know why.) He graduated from Stanford, worked at Facebook and left at 26 for a fellowship in New York, hoping to produce software for people in poverty.Mr. Chen founded Propel in 2014 with $11,000 from a Kickstarter campaign, pitched about 60 investors without success and went two years without a salary. After planning to work on SNAP applications, he shifted to focus on people who were already enrolled and developed the balance display.The existing technology did allow people to check their balances, but it did not work well on mobile phones, and a phone line required a 16-digit number. While studying how poor people shop, Mr. Chen saw them buy cheap items — often a banana — to check the balance on their receipts. It struck him as “disrespectful,” one more hassle that they did not need.In tech terms, a balance display was no special feat, but reaching SNAP recipients was. Mr. Chen said the app’s users checked it on average 17 times a month. Ms. Young, 54, said she checked it more frequently than that.“I check it all day, every day,” she said. “It makes me reassured, knowing that I’m going to have food.” Ms. Young, who gets by on a disability payment of about $800 a month after injuring her back, said she had run out of funds at the register; discarding items while others watched “makes you feel like you’re just pitiful.”Ms. Wilson said the app created a sense of belonging among people used to feeling stigmatized.Mike Belleme for The New York TimesMs. Wilson is so concerned about her balance that she keeps it in her head: It was $14.02 the other day.While the app does not let users talk to each other, she said it still created a sense of belonging among those who felt stigmatized. “It just made me see there were a whole group of people out there in the same circumstance,” she said.The app also tells people how much they have spent and where they spent it; offers recipes and budgeting tools; and provides news about other benefits. It generates revenue by selling ads, often to grocers offering discounts or employers offering jobs; Mr. Chen said the goal was to align the company’s financial interests with those of its users.In early 2016, the app had a few thousand users. A year later, it had about 200,000. Propel landed investments from Andreessen Horowitz, a top venture capital firm, and the sports stars Kevin Durant and Serena Williams. Forbes estimated that the company was worth $100 million, a sum that Mr. Chen called “not far off.”Partnering with a charity, Give Directly, during the pandemic, Propel distributed $180 million to randomly selected app users, offering them $1,000 each. It also moved into advocacy, adding a feature that lets users ask their members of Congress to extend the temporary child tax credit expansion. The app now offers an account that can receive paychecks and other government benefits, prompted in part by the difficulties that the poorest households experienced in collecting stimulus checks, because they often lack stable bank accounts.However they make ends meet, Mr. Chen said, poor people should know where they stand without having to buy a banana.“We pay hundreds of billions of dollars to fund these programs,” he said. “Why not make them work well?” More

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    Unemployment Benefits to Millions Are About to End

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    The abrupt loss of pandemic unemployment benefits on a broad scale could have long-term effects not only for the recipients but also for the economy.PHILADELPHIA — Tara Harrison has a master’s degree, yet is applying for the low-paying receptionist jobs she last held as a teenager. Evan Ocheret is considering giving up his career in music. Amanda McCarty is worried about losing her place in the middle class. Amanda Rinehart is considering borrowing money from her grandmother or selling blood plasma to feed herself and her son.Unemployment benefits have helped stave off financial ruin for millions of laid-off workers over the last year and a half. After this week, that lifeline will snap: An estimated 7.5 million people will lose their benefits when federally funded emergency unemployment programs end. Millions more will see their checks cut by $300 a week.The cutoff is the latest and arguably the largest of the benefit “cliffs” that jobless workers have faced during the pandemic. Last summer, the government ended a $600 weekly supplement that workers received early in the crisis, but other programs remained in place. In December, benefits briefly lapsed for millions of workers, but Congress quickly restored them.This time, no similar rescue appears likely. President Biden has encouraged states with high unemployment rates to use existing federal funds to extend benefits, but few appear likely to do so. And administration officials have said repeatedly that they will not seek a congressional extension of the benefits.The politics of this cliff are different in part because it affects primarily Democratic-leaning states. Roughly half of states, nearly all of them with Republican governors, have already ended some or all of the federal benefits on the grounds that they were discouraging people from returning to work. So far, there is little evidence they were right: States that cut off benefits have experienced job growth this summer that was little different from that in states that retained the programs.In the states that kept the benefits, the cutoff will mean the loss of billions of dollars a week in aid when the pandemic is resurgent and the economic recovery is showing signs of fragility. And for workers and their families, it will mean losing their only source of income as other pandemic programs, such as the federal eviction moratorium, are ending. Even under the most optimistic forecasts, it will take months for everyone losing aid to find a job, with potentially long-term consequences for both workers and the economy.“I have no idea what I’m going to do once these benefits stop,” Ms. Rinehart said.When the pandemic began, Ms. Rinehart, 33, was an assistant general manager at a hotel in Allentown, Pa. She held on to her job at first, taking her young son with her to work. But when that proved untenable, she left the job, and has been unemployed ever since, most recently living on about $560 a week in benefits, all of which will end this weekend.A single mother, Ms. Rinehart has been unwilling to send her son, now 8, back to the classroom because he has asthma and several other health conditions that make him especially vulnerable to the coronavirus. He is too young to be vaccinated and too young to be left alone, and she has been unable to find a job that would let her work from home.“They should not cut these benefits off until there is a vaccine for all the little humans of all ages, because there are parents like me that have children that are high risk for Covid,” she said.Ms. Rinehart is one of nearly half a million Pennsylvanians who will lose their benefits this weekend, according to estimates from the Century Foundation, a progressive research institute. The state has an unemployment rate of 6.6 percent, well above the national rate of 5.4 percent.Pennsylvania, like the country as a whole, has experienced a significant economic rebound, but a partial one: Domestic tourists this summer again lined up to see Independence Hall and the Liberty Bell, and thrill-seekers again rode the roller coasters at Hersheypark. But many downtown offices in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh remain all but empty, and conventioneers have not yet returned to conference hotels, or to the restaurants and bars that relied on their business. Overall, Pennsylvania has regained about two-thirds of the jobs lost in the pandemic, compared with about three-quarters nationally.“There’s been a partial recovery in a lot of the industries that are shut down, but it’s not back to where it was,” said Barney Oursler, director of the Mon Valley Unemployed Committee, a workers’ rights group in Pittsburgh. The committee was formed in the 1980s in response to layoffs in the steel industry; it has had a second life in the pandemic, helping thousands of Pennsylvanians navigate the state’s unemployment system.Mr. Ocheret, 32, is a professional oboist in Philadelphia. Before the pandemic, he cobbled together a living as a freelancer, performing with symphonies and opera companies up and down the Eastern Seaboard, and picking up the occasional gig with pop artists who wanted onstage orchestra sections. It all dried up almost overnight in March 2020.Performances began to return this spring, and Mr. Ocheret recently picked up a once-a-week gig that will last into September with an orchestra in New Jersey. But his calendar remains sparse this fall, and without unemployment benefits to fall back on, he isn’t sure how he will get by. He has signed up for computer coding courses to give him another option — one that he doesn’t want to take, but that he says he may have to consider if the industry doesn’t rebound by the end of the year.“I hate to stop doing the thing I love,” Mr. Ocheret said. “But if things don’t start to improve, I may have to do something different.”Before the pandemic, Evan Ocheret, a professional oboist in Philadelphia, made a living as a freelancer.Hannah Yoon for The New York TimesThree federal programs will end this weekend. One, which extended regular benefits beyond the 26 weeks offered in most states, covers about 3.3 million people, according to the Century Foundation. A second program, Pandemic Unemployment Assistance, covers 4.2 million gig workers, the self-employed and others who don’t qualify for standard benefits. Nearly three million additional people will lose a $300 weekly federal supplement to other unemployment benefits.When Congress last renewed the programs in March, as part of Mr. Biden’s American Rescue Plan, policymakers hoped that September would represent a return to normal for the economy. If most Americans were vaccinated and the pandemic was under control, then schools and offices could reopen and people could return to work.But the rise of the Delta variant has complicated that picture. Major employers across the country have shelved their return-to-office plans. International tourism remains largely shut down, and restaurants, which were packed for much of the summer, are seeing reservations slow.“We’re in a different place now than we thought we were going to be,” Ms. McCarty said. “The Sept. 6 deadline made sense maybe in May and June. It seems preposterous now.”Ms. McCarty, 43, was furloughed as a buyer for a large Philadelphia clothing retailer at the start of the pandemic. A few months later, the job loss turned permanent, reshaping the McCartys’ lives.The family moved from Philadelphia to Lancaster County in search of cheaper housing. Ms. McCarty’s husband, a graphic designer, earns enough to pay rent, but they are still figuring out how to cover their other bills without the roughly $900 a week they were getting in unemployment benefits. Their 19-year-old daughter has set aside her college plans. And Ms. McCarty, a cancer survivor, is putting off medical tests until she can afford to pay the deductible on her insurance plan.“You put 10, 15, 20 years into a career and then to suddenly not be able to go see a dentist anymore, it feels like something’s wrong there,” she said. “I think I’m still grieving the loss of my opportunity of being middle class, because that’s gone again.”Regular unemployment benefits, without the $300 add-on, replace only a fraction of workers’ lost wages. In Pennsylvania, the maximum benefit is $580 a week, the equivalent of about $30,000 a year. In some Southern states, the maximum benefit is less than $300 a week.Still, decades of economic research have shown that unemployment benefits are at least a bit of a disincentive to seeking work. When the economy is weak, that negative consequence is offset by the positive impact the benefits have on workers, but many economists argue that it makes sense to ramp down benefits as the economy improves.Cutting off benefits for millions of people all at once, however, is another matter.“Losing a job is something that we know from research is one of the most damaging things to your financial and personal well-being over the long run,” said Andrew Stettner, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation. “We’ve avoided those kinds of long-term impacts to a large part during the pandemic because we’ve been aggressive with our forms of support. Now we’re pulling it back, we’re putting people at risk.”Ms. Harrison, despite her master’s degree, has already lost her job twice since the pandemic began. She was furloughed from her human resources job early on. She eventually found work helping to run a Covid-testing business, but was laid off again in March as the pandemic began to ebb. Now she spends her days scouring job boards and sending applications.“It’s going to end,” she said of the unemployment benefits. “You know it’s going to end. So you can’t just sit around and twiddle your thumbs.”Her husband has diabetes and high blood pressure, and they live with her mother, so Ms. Harrison, 47, is reluctant to return to in-person work until the pandemic is under control. Despite having a master’s degree and senior-level experience, she is applying for positions as a receptionist or an administrative assistant — jobs she last did decades ago.“I spent years in school — I spent money out of my own pocket to better educate myself — so that I would be able to be a good breadwinner and take care of my family,” she said. “Never did I think I would be applying to be somebody’s receptionist. But if somebody called me to be their receptionist, I’m taking it.”Jim Tankersley More

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    Supreme Court Ends Biden’s Eviction Moratorium

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    The ruling followed political and legal maneuvering by the administration to retain protections for tenants. It puts hundreds of thousands at risk of being put out of their homes.WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Thursday rejected the Biden administration’s latest moratorium on evictions, ending a political and legal dispute during a public health crisis in which the administration’s shifting positions had subjected it to criticism from adversaries and allies alike.The court issued an eight-page majority opinion, an unusual move in a ruling on an application for emergency relief, where terse orders are more common. The court’s three liberal justices dissented.The decision puts hundreds of thousands of tenants at risk of losing shelter, while the administration struggles to speed the flow of billions of dollars in federal funding to people who are behind in rent because of the coronavirus pandemic and its associated economic hardship. Only about $5.1 billion of the $46.5 billion in aid had been disbursed by the end of July, according to figures released on Wednesday, as bureaucratic delays at the state and local levels snarled payouts.The majority opinion, which was unsigned, said the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had exceeded its authority.“The C.D.C. has imposed a nationwide moratorium on evictions in reliance on a decades-old statute that authorizes it to implement measures like fumigation and pest extermination,” the opinion said. “It strains credulity to believe that this statute grants the C.D.C. the sweeping authority that it asserts.”Justice Stephen G. Breyer, writing for the three dissenting justices, faulted the court for its haste during a public health crisis.“These questions call for considered decision-making, informed by full briefing and argument,” he wrote. “Their answers impact the health of millions. We should not set aside the C.D.C.’s eviction moratorium in this summary proceeding.”The majority said the issues were fully considered and straightforward. “It is indisputable that the public has a strong interest in combating the spread of the Covid-19 Delta variant,” the opinion said. “But our system does not permit agencies to act unlawfully even in pursuit of desirable ends.”“If a federally imposed eviction moratorium is to continue,” the opinion said, “Congress must specifically authorize it.”In dissent, Justice Breyer wrote that “the public interest is not favored by the spread of disease or a court’s second-guessing of the C.D.C.’s judgment.”The Biden administration and other moratorium proponents predicted that the decision would set off a wave of dire consequences.“As a result of this ruling, families will face the painful impact of evictions, and communities across the country will face greater risk of exposure to Covid-19,” Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary, said in a statement.The ruling also renewed pressure on congressional Democrats to try to extend the freeze over the opposition of Republicans.“Tonight, the Supreme Court failed to protect the 11 million households across our country from violent eviction in the middle of a deadly global pandemic,” said Representative Cori Bush, a Missouri Democrat who slept on the steps of the Capitol this month to protest the expiration of the previous moratorium. “We already know who is going to bear the brunt of this disastrous decision: Black and brown communities, and especially Black women.”But landlords, who have said the moratoriums saddled them with billions of dollars in debt, hailed the move.“The government must move past failed policies and begin to seriously address the nation’s debt tsunami, which is crippling both renters and housing providers alike,” said Bob Pinnegar, the president of the National Apartment Association, a trade association representing large landlords.It will most likely take a while for the backlog of eviction cases in many states to result in the displacement of renters. But tenant groups in the South, where fast-track evictions are common, are bracing for the worst.In recent days, Mr. Biden’s team has been mapping out strategies to deal with the likely loss of the moratorium, with a plan to focus its efforts on a handful of states — including South Carolina, Tennessee, Georgia and Ohio — that have large backlogs of unpaid rent and few statewide protections for tenants.The administration had at first concluded that a Supreme Court ruling in June had effectively forbidden it from imposing a new moratorium after an earlier one expired at the end of July. While the administration had prevailed in that ruling by a 5-to-4 vote, one member of the majority, Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh, wrote that he believed the moratorium to be unlawful and that he had cast his vote to temporarily sustain it only to allow an orderly transition. He would not support a further extension without “clear and specific congressional authorization (via new legislation),” he wrote.Congress did not act. But after political pressure from Democrats, a surge in the pandemic and new consideration of the legal issues, the administration on Aug. 3 issued the moratorium that was the subject of the new ruling.The administration’s legal maneuvering might have failed, but it bought some time for tenants threatened with eviction. In unusually candid remarks this month, President Biden said that was part of his calculus in deciding to proceed with the new moratorium, which was set to expire Oct. 3.Congress declared a moratorium on evictions at the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, but it lapsed in July 2020. The C.D.C. then issued a series of its own moratoriums, saying that they were justified by the need to address the pandemic and authorized by a 1944 law. People unable to pay rent, the agency said, should not be forced to crowd in with relatives or seek refuge in homeless shelters, spreading the virus.The last moratorium — which was put in place by the C.D.C. in September and expired on July 31 after being extended several times by Congress and Mr. Biden — was effective at achieving its goal, reducing by about half the number of eviction cases that normally would have been filed since last fall, according to an analysis of filings by the Eviction Lab at Princeton University.The challengers in the current case — landlords, real estate companies and trade associations led by the Alabama Association of Realtors — argued that the moratorium was not authorized by the law the agency relied on, the Public Health Service Act of 1944.That law, the challengers wrote, was concerned with quarantines and inspections to stop the spread of disease and did not bestow on the agency “the unqualified power to take any measure imaginable to stop the spread of communicable disease — whether eviction moratoria, worship limits, nationwide lockdowns, school closures or vaccine mandates.”The C.D.C. responded that the moratorium was authorized by the 1944 law. Evictions would accelerate the spread of the coronavirus, the agency said, by forcing people “to move, often into close quarters in new shared housing settings with friends or family, or congregate settings such as homeless shelters.”The moratorium, the administration told the justices, was broadly similar to quarantine. “It would be strange to hold that the government may combat infection by prohibiting the tenant from leaving his home,” its brief said, “but not by prohibiting the landlord from throwing him out.”The case was complicated by congressional action in December, when lawmakers briefly extended the C.D.C.’s moratorium through the end of January in an appropriations measure. When Congress took no further action, the agency again imposed moratoriums under the 1944 law.In its Supreme Court brief, the government argued that it was significant that Congress had embraced the agency’s action, if only briefly.The central legal question in the case was whether the agency was entitled to act on its own. In June, with the earlier moratorium about to expire, the court voted 5 to 4 in favor of the administration, allowing that measure to stand.But that victory was distinctly provisional. Justice Kavanaugh, who voted with the majority, wrote that he had cast his vote reluctantly and had taken account of the then-impending expiration of the earlier moratorium.“The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention exceeded its existing statutory authority by issuing a nationwide eviction moratorium,” Justice Kavanaugh wrote. “Because the C.D.C. plans to end the moratorium in only a few weeks, on July 31, and because those few weeks will allow for additional and more orderly distribution of the congressionally appropriated rental assistance funds, I vote at this time to deny the application” that had been filed by the challengers.The other members of the court did not give reasons for their votes in the June ruling. But four of them — Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel A. Alito Jr., Neil M. Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett — voted to lift the earlier moratorium. Taken together with Justice Kavanaugh’s statement, that distinctly suggested that a majority of the justices would not look favorably on another extension unless it came from Congress.The Biden administration initially seemed to share that understanding, urging Congress to act and saying it did not have the unilateral power to impose a further moratorium through executive action. When Congress failed to enact legislation addressing the issue, the moratorium expired.Under pressure from Speaker Nancy Pelosi and other Democrats and wary of the rise of the Delta variant, the administration reversed course a few days later.The new moratorium was not identical to the earlier one, which had applied nationwide. It was instead tailored to counties where Covid-19 was strongest, a category that currently covers some 90 percent of counties in the United States.Mr. Biden was frank in discussing his reasoning, saying the new measure faced long odds but would buy tenants some time.“The bulk of the constitutional scholarship says that it’s not likely to pass constitutional muster,” he said on Aug. 3. “But there are several key scholars who think that it may — and it’s worth the effort.”Many states and localities, including New York and California, have extended their own moratoriums, providing another layer of protection for some renters. In some places, judges, aware of the potential for large numbers of people to be put out on the street even as the pandemic intensifies again, have said they would slow-walk cases and make greater use of eviction diversion programs. More

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    Cutting off jobless benefits early may have hurt state economies.

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    When states began cutting off federal unemployment benefits this summer, their governors argued that the move would push people to return to work.New research suggests that ending the benefits did indeed lead some people to get jobs, but that far more people did not, leaving them — and perhaps also their states’ economies — worse off.A total of 26 states, all but one with Republican governors, have moved to end the expanded unemployment benefits that have been in place since the pandemic began. Many business owners blame the benefits for discouraging people from returning to work, while supporters argue they have provided a lifeline to people who lost jobs in the pandemic.The extra benefits are set to expire nationwide next month, although President Biden on Thursday encouraged states with high unemployment rates to use separate federal funds to continue the programs.To study the policies’ effect, a team of economists used data from Earnin, a financial services company, to review anonymized banking records from more than 18,000 low-income workers who were receiving unemployment benefits in late April.A Small Rise in EmploymentShare of workers on unemployment in late April who later began working.

    Note: Chart reflects data in 19 states that have cut off benefits, and 23 that have retained them. Source: Earnin via Coombs, et al.By The New York TimesThe researchers found that ending the benefits did have an effect on employment: In states that cut off benefits, about 26 percent of people in the study were working in early August, compared with about 22 percent of people in states that continued the benefits.But far more people did not find jobs. In the 19 states ending the programs for which researchers had data, about two million people lost their benefits entirely, and a million had their payments reduced. Of those, only about 145,000 people found jobs because of the cutoff. (The researchers argue the true number is probably even lower, because the workers they were studying were the people most likely to be severely affected by the loss of income, and therefore may not have been representative of everyone receiving benefits.)A Big Drop in BenefitsShare of workers on unemployment in late April who continued to receive benefits in some form.

    Note: Chart reflects data in 19 states that have cut off benefits, and 23 that have retained them. Source: Earnin via Coombs, et al.By The New York TimesCutting off the benefits left unemployed workers worse off on average. The researchers estimate that workers lost an average of $278 a week in benefits because of the change, and gained just $14 a week in earnings (not $14 an hour, as previously reported here). They compensated by cutting spending by $145 a week — a roughly 20 percent reduction — and thus put less money into their local economies.“The labor market didn’t pop after you kicked these people off,” said Michael Stepner, a University of Toronto economist who was one of the study’s authors. “Most of these people are not finding jobs, and it’s going to take them a long time to get their earnings back.”Less Income, Less SpendingAverage impact of ending federal programs on weekly unemployment benefits, earnings and spending, among people who were on unemployment in late April.

    Notes: Data is as of Aug. 6 and includes 19 states that have cut off benefits. Source: Earnin via Coombs, et al.By The New York TimesThe findings are consistent with other recent research that has found that the extra unemployment benefits have had a measurable but small effect on the number of people working and looking for work. The next piece of evidence will come Friday morning, when the Labor Department will release state-level data on employment in July.Coral Murphy Marcos More

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    Federal Unemployment Aid Is Now a Political Lightning Rod

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    Republican-led states are cutting off relief months ahead of schedule, citing openings aplenty. Some jobless workers face hardships and tough choices.Of the more than four million people whose jobless benefits are going to be cut off in the next few weeks, Bre Starr will be among the first.That’s because Ms. Starr — a 34-year-old pizza delivery driver who has been out of work for more than a year — lives in Iowa, where the governor has decided to withdraw from all federal pandemic-related jobless assistance next Saturday.Iowa is one of 25 states, all led by Republicans, that have recently decided to halt some or all emergency benefits months ahead of schedule. With a Labor Department report on Friday showing that job growth fell below expectations for the second month in a row, Republicans stepped up their argument that pandemic jobless relief is hindering the recovery.The assistance, renewed in March and funded through Sept. 6, doesn’t cost the states anything. But business owners and managers have argued that the income, which enabled people to pay rent and stock refrigerators when much of the economy shut down, is now dissuading them from applying for jobs.“Now that our businesses and schools have reopened, these payments are discouraging people from returning to work,” Gov. Kim Reynolds of Iowa said in announcing the cutoff. “We have more jobs available than unemployed people.”While the governor complains that people aren’t returning to work soon enough, however, some Iowans respond that they are being forced to return too soon.“I’m a Type 1 diabetic, so it’s really important for me to stay safe from getting Covid,” Ms. Starr said, explaining that she was more prone to infection. “I know that for myself and other people who are high risk, we cannot risk going back into the work force until everything is good again.”But just what does “good again” mean?Covid-19 cases have been declining in Iowa as they have throughout the country, and deaths are at their lowest levels since last summer. State restrictions were lifted in February, businesses are reopening, and Iowa’s unemployment rate was 3.8 percent in April, the latest period for which state figures are available — much lower than the national 6.1 percent that month. (Unemployment rates in the 25 states that are cutting off benefits ranged from 2.8 percent to 6.7 percent.)Still, an average of 15,000 new cases and more than 400 related deaths are being reported daily across the country, and barely 40 percent of the population has been fully vaccinated.Most economists say there is no clear, single explanation yet for the difficulty that some employers are having in hiring. Government relief may play a role in some cases, but so could a lack of child care, continuing fears about infection, paltry wages, difficult working conditions and normal delays associated with reopening a mammoth economy.The particular complaints that government benefits are sapping the desire to work have, nonetheless, struck a chord among Republican political leaders.In Ms. Starr’s case, Ms. Reynolds’s move to end federal jobless relief in Iowa is likely to have its intended effect.Ms. Starr can be counted among the long-term unemployed. She has relied on a mix of pandemic-related benefits since last spring, when she left her job as a delivery driver for Domino’s Pizza after co-workers started getting ill.She could probably have already gotten her job back; Domino’s in Des Moines is advertising for drivers. But Ms. Starr has been reluctant to apply.“A lot of people in Iowa don’t wear masks — they think that Covid is fake,” said Ms. Starr, who worries not only about her own susceptibility to infection but also about the health of her 71-year-old father, whom she helps care for: He has emphysema, diabetes and heart troubles.An early withdrawal from the federal government’s network of jobless relief programs affects everyone in the state who collects unemployment insurance. Ms. Starr, like all recipients, will lose a weekly $300 federal stipend that was designed to supplement jobless benefits, which generally replace a fraction of someone’s previous wage. In most of the states, the decision will also end Pandemic Unemployment Assistance, which covers freelancers, part-timers and self-employed workers who are not normally eligible for unemployment insurance. And it will halt Pandemic Emergency Unemployment Compensation, which continues paying people who have exhausted their regular allotment.In addition to the $300 supplement, Ms. Starr gets $172 a week in Pandemic Unemployment Assistance. The total is about $230 less than she earned at her previous job. The government checks pay for her rent, food and some of her father’s medicine, she said.Ms. Starr, who is vaccinated, said the governor’s order would probably force her to go back to work despite her health fears. She is thinking about some kind of customer service job from her home, although that would require her to buy a laptop and maybe get landline telephone service, she said. Absent that, she said, she may have to take another delivery job or work in an office.Whether her case is evidence that ending jobless benefits early makes sense depends on one’s perspective.A brewery in Phoenix. As local economies flicker back to life, federal emergency benefits have prompted a debate over whether pandemic jobless relief is helping or hindering the recovery.Juan Arredondo for The New York TimesIn many cases, the problem is not that people don’t want to work, said Jesse Rothstein, a professor of public policy and economics at the University of California, Berkeley. Rather, benefits give the jobless more options, he said, like an ability “to say no to things that maybe aren’t safe or aren’t good fits.”Mr. Rothstein, though, cautioned against drawing broad conclusions.“The reopening happened really quickly,” he said. As a result, he said, it’s not surprising that there is friction in ramping up and hiring that could be unrelated to benefits. “It may just be that it takes a few weeks to reopen,” he added. “Some of the trouble employers are having in finding workers is that they all tried to find them the same day.”At the online job site Indeed, job searches in states that announced an early end to federal unemployment benefits picked up relative to the national trend. But the increase was modest — about 5 percent — and vanished a week later, said Jed Kolko, the chief economist for Indeed. And low-wage jobs weren’t the only ones to attract more responses; so did finance positions and openings for doctors.Aside from any discussion about the impact of jobless benefits on the labor market, economists have warned of long-lasting scars inflicted on the economy by the pandemic.“It’s important to remember we are not going back to the same economy,” the Federal Reserve chair, Jerome H. Powell, has said. “This will be a different economy.”“The real concern,” he said, “is that longer-term unemployment can allow people’s skills to atrophy, their connections to the labor market to dwindle, and they have a hard time getting back to work.”Roughly 41 percent of the nation’s 9.3 million unemployed fall into the long-term category, defined as more than 26 weeks. About 28 percent of the total have been unemployed for more than a year.Historically, this group, which is disproportionately made up of Black and older Americans, has had a tougher time getting hired. That pattern was likely to be repeated even in the unusual circumstances caused by the pandemic, said Carl Van Horn, the founding director of the Heldrich Center for Workforce Development at Rutgers University.Employers tend to take a negative view of people who have been out of work for an extended period or have gaps in their résumés, regardless of the reasons, Mr. Van Horn said.“Employers always complain about not being able to find the job seeker they want at that moment at the price they are willing to pay, whether it’s the best economy in 50 years or a terrible economy,” he said.The problem with prematurely ending jobless benefits, he said, is that “such a broad brush policy also punishes people who are also desperately looking for work.”That’s the situation that Amy Cabrera says she faces in Arizona. Since she was furloughed last summer, Ms. Cabrera, 45, has been living off about $500 a week in unemployment benefits, after taxes — roughly half the $50,000 salary in her previous job conducting audits in the meetings and events department at American Express.To make ends meet, she has given up the lease on her car and sublet a room in the house she rents in the San Tan Valley, southeast of Phoenix. “I’m paying for my food — whatever I need to survive — and that’s it,” she said, as she sat in the used 2006 Jeep she bought so she would not be carless. Food stamps are helping pay for her meals.But Ms. Cabrera rejected the idea that there were plenty of jobs to be had in Arizona, where the governor has moved to end the $300 federal supplement on July 10. Many positions she is qualified for, including executive administration and office management jobs, are paying $15 an hour, she said, far from enough to pay her $1,550 monthly rent and part of her son’s college tuition. Jobs in Phoenix or Tempe would require her to commute nearly two hours each way during rush hour. And because of a bad back, she can’t have a job that would require her to spend time on her feet.“I have desperately been looking for work,” Ms. Cabrera said. Still, of the roughly 100 jobs she estimated she had applied for, she has had only one interview.She said she didn’t know how she would live on her remaining unemployment benefits — $214 a week after taxes — when she loses the $300 supplement.“I really don’t have an answer for that yet,” she said. “I’ve really just been trying to roll with the punches.” More

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    Republicans Push Biden to Divert Federal Aid for Infrastructure

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    Unexpected receipts, driven in part by taxes on high earners riding a hot stock market, have prompted Republicans to push the president to spend on infrastructure instead.WASHINGTON — From California to Virginia, many states that faced devastating shortfalls in the depths of the pandemic recession now find themselves flush with tax revenues because of a rebounding economy and a soaring stock market. Lawmakers who worried about budget cuts are now proposing lucrative increases in school spending, tax cuts and direct payments to their residents. More

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    Unemployment claims fell last week.

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    New claims for unemployment benefits fell last week, the government reported on Thursday, as the labor market slowly recovers from the staggering losses wreaked by the coronavirus pandemic.About 487,000 workers filed first-time claims for state benefits during the week that ended May 8, the Labor Department said, a decrease from 514,000 the week before. In addition, about 104,000 new claims were filed for Pandemic Unemployment Assistance, a federal program covering freelancers, part-timers and others who do not routinely qualify for state benefits.Neither figure is seasonally adjusted. On a seasonally adjusted basis, new state claims totaled 473,000.After more than a year of being whipsawed by the pandemic, the economy has been showing new life. Restrictions are lifting, businesses are reopening and job listings are on the upswing. But hiring in April was weaker than expected.Some employers, particularly in the restaurant and hospitality sectors, have complained of having trouble finding workers. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce and several Republican governors have asserted that a temporary $300-a-week federal unemployment supplement has made workers reluctant to return to the job.The U.S. Labor Department said that as of Wednesday, six states — Iowa, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, North Dakota and South Carolina — had notified the department that they were terminating federal pandemic-related unemployment benefits next month.The unemployment rates in those states in March, the latest month for which data is available, ranged from 3.7 percent in Iowa to 6.3 percent in Mississippi.Several other states with Republican governors, including Tennessee, Arkansas, Alabama, Wyoming and Idaho, have said they also plan to withdraw from the federal program. Tennessee and Alabama are among the states that offer the lowest maximum benefit to qualified individuals each week.But economists are skeptical that jobless benefits are playing anything more than a bit part in the pace of the job market’s recovery.“There is tremendous churn in this labor market,” said Gregory Daco, chief U.S. economist at Oxford Economics. “There are still major supply constraints and unemployment benefits are not the most important one. The virus is.”Many workers have children at home who are not attending school in person. Others are wary of returning to jobs that require face-to-face encounters. Covid-19 infections have decreased since September but there are still 38,000 new cases being reported each day and 600 Covid-related deaths. Less than half the population is fully vaccinated.There is halting progress from employers as well, as businesses continually update their assessment of costs and customer demand. “The hiring pattern isn’t going to be smooth,” Mr. Daco said. “Businesses hire and then reassess. They need to find the right balance, it’s a trial and error process more than anything.”Federal jobless benefits are due to expire in September. Prematurely halting them is “detrimental to the economy,” Mr. Daco said. “You’re voluntarily hurting certain vulnerable tranches of the population.”Nationwide, the unemployment rate was 6.1 percent, and there are 8.2 million fewer jobs than in February 2020. More

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    Biden Defends Unemployment Benefits, Provided Workers Accept Job Offers

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    The president’s comments and a raft of policy announcements were a pushback to Republican criticism of his economic plan after a disappointing jobs report on Friday.WASHINGTON — President Biden ordered the Labor Department on Monday to ensure that unemployed Americans cannot draw enhanced federal jobless benefits if they turn down a suitable job offer, even as he rejected claims by Republicans that his weekly unemployment bonus is undermining efforts to get millions of Americans back to work.Stung from a weekend of criticism over a disappointing April jobs report, Mr. Biden struck a defiant tone, seeking to make clear that he expects workers to return to jobs if they are available, while defending his signature economic policy effort thus far and blaming corporate America, in part, for not doing more to entice people to go back to work.The president told reporters at the White House that child care constraints, school closures and fears of contracting the coronavirus had hindered job creation last month, and he challenged companies to help workers gain access to vaccines and to raise their pay.“The last Congress, before I became president, gave businesses over $1.4 trillion in Covid relief,” Mr. Biden said. “Congress may have approved that money, but let’s be clear: The money came from the American people, and it went from the American people to American businesses, many of them big businesses, to help them get through this pandemic and keep their doors open.”He added, “My expectation is that, as our economy comes back, these companies will provide fair wages and safe work environments.” He said that if they did, “they’ll find plenty of workers, and we’re all going to come out of this together better than before.”Mr. Biden also promised more relief was working its way into the economy through measures created by the $1.9 trillion “American Rescue Plan” that the president signed into law in March. That includes help for child care providers and aid for state and local governments that Treasury Department officials began to make available on Monday.His defense of the stimulus funds and his administration’s handling of the economy comes as Mr. Biden is trying to win support for even more federal spending, including a $2.3 trillion jobs proposal centered on physical infrastructure.Republicans have already criticized Mr. Biden for the disappointing jobs numbers and have suggested he is wreaking havoc with the economic recovery. In particular, they blamed a provision in his rescue plan that extended a $300-per-week federal supplement for unemployed Americans. They say those benefits are depressing hiring by discouraging Americans from returning to work.An aide to Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, emailed reporters on Monday, accusing Mr. Biden of placing “handcuffs” on the recovery by extending the jobless benefits.Senator Ben Sasse, Republican of Nebraska, said on Monday that Mr. Biden was “all over the place” on the issue.“He wants to go after folks who are gaming the system, but he’s denying the reality that his policies are making the situation worse, so he’s trying to make struggling businesses the boogeymen,” Mr. Sasse said in a news release. “Here’s the deal: Bad federal policy is making unemployment pay more than work, and millions of jobs aren’t getting filled.”Mr. Biden said on Monday that his administration would make clear that any worker who turned down a suitable job offer, with rare exceptions for health fears related to the virus, would lose access to unemployment benefits.To ensure those rules are being followed, the Labor Department will work with states to reinstate work search requirements. Those rules, which require that anyone collecting unemployment benefits provide proof that they are actively searching for work, were suspended during the pandemic.Twenty-nine states have already reinstated them, and the Labor Department will “work with the remaining states, as health and safety conditions allow, to put in place appropriate work search requirements as the economy continues to rebound, vaccinations increase, and the pandemic is brought under control,” White House officials said in a fact sheet.The president also pointed to new guidance issued Monday by the Treasury Department that will help state, local and tribal governments gain access to more than $350 billion in relief funds made available by the American Rescue Plan. He said that money would help speed hiring and economic growth.“With this funding, communities hit hard by Covid-19 will able to return to a semblance of normalcy,” the Treasury secretary, Janet L. Yellen, said in a statement on Monday on the relief funds.Erin Scott for The New York TimesThe details of how the Treasury Department will disburse those funds, which can be spent on pandemic-related costs, have been eagerly awaited by states, cities, territories and tribal governments that are expected to receive money. But several Republican-led states and the Biden administration are in a legal confrontation over whether states can cut taxes after taking relief money and using it to solidify their budgets.A fact sheet accompanying the announcement about the distribution on Monday made clear that the relief money could not be used to subsidize tax cuts directly or indirectly, which could discourage some states from accepting funds.“The American Rescue Plan ensures that funds needed to provide vital services and support public employees, small businesses and families struggling to make it through the pandemic are not used to fund reductions in net tax revenue,” the Treasury Department said. “If the funds provided have been used to offset tax cuts, the amount used for this purpose must be paid back to the Treasury.”The Treasury Department also issued detailed guidance to states explaining how it would determine if the money was being used properly and in which cases the relief funds could be recouped. If a state does cut taxes, it will have to demonstrate to the Treasury Department that it offset that lost revenue with spending cuts or another source of revenue that does not include the fiscal recovery funds. If the state cannot do that, the department can claw back that amount of money.“This process ensures fiscal recovery funds are used in a manner consistent with the statute’s defined eligible uses and the offset provision’s limitation on these eligible uses, while avoiding undue interference with state and territory decisions regarding tax and spending policies,” the guidance said.Treasury and White House officials made clear that they would scrutinize how the funds were being used to ensure that state budgets were not being gamed to violate the intent of the law. A new recovery office at the Treasury Department will coordinate with states to help determine if their policies are in line with conditions set forth in the law.The relief money also cannot be paid into state pension funds to reduce unfunded liabilities.A White House official would not comment on whether initiatives like Montana’s return-to-work bonuses could be funded using relief money. States and cities are being given broad discretion on how they can use the money, which is intended to replace public sector revenue that was lost during the pandemic; to provide extra pay for essential workers; and to be invested in sewer, water and broadband infrastructure.The Treasury Department’s directive is unlikely to put the legal fight over whether states can cut taxes to rest. Mark Brnovich, the attorney general of Arizona, which is suing the Biden administration, said that Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen’s guidance failed to clarify the matter.“Arizona should not be put in a position of losing billions of dollars because the federal government wants to commandeer states’ tax policies,” Mr. Brnovich said.The allocation of the funds is also likely to be a contentious matter as the money starts to flow. Some states have complained that states that managed the pandemic well are essentially being penalized because the formula for awarding aid is based on state unemployment rates.The Treasury Department said on Monday that the states that were hardest hit economically by the pandemic would also get their money faster.Local governments will generally receive half of the money this month and the rest next year. But states that currently have a net increase in unemployment of more than two percentage points since February 2020 will get the funds in a lump sum right away.Officials also said Monday that the administration would issue new guidelines meant to speed money from the recovery act to help child care centers reopen, and that the Labor Department would highlight a program that allows some unemployed workers to accept offers of part-time jobs without losing access to the federally supplemented benefits.Mr. Biden said that the efforts would help the economy recover — and that the rebound from recession remained on track.“Let’s be clear: Our economic plan is working,” he said. But he said recovery would not always prove to be easy or even. “Some months will exceed expectations,” he said, “others will fall short.” More