Confusion for unemployed NC workers, after Trump orders new benefits
Despite millions of people still being out of work because of coronavirus shutdowns, the additional federal unemployment benefits of $600 a week ended at the start of this month.
For some, like gig workers and self-employed people, the federal benefits were the only unemployment help they could get. For others, the federal benefits were paid on top of anything they got from their state government’s unemployment fund.
Congress did not extend those federal benefits, after opposition in the Republican-controlled Senate, and Democrats’ rejection of a short-term deal proposed by the White House. But over the weekend, Republican President Donald Trump claimed the authority to extend the benefits even without Congress doing anything. He announced a plan to give unemployed people additional benefits of $400 a week — less than the $600 people had been getting since March.
However, Trump has sent mixed messages on whether states would be required to pay for part of the additional unemployment funding. He originally said states would have to pay for a quarter of the spending in order to get anything, but later said that maybe some states could pay less, or perhaps nothing at all, CNN reported.
For now, with so much uncertainty, it’s unclear if North Carolina’s leaders are fully on board.
Money from FEMA disaster relief fund
Spokespeople for Republican Senate leader Phil Berger didn’t respond to questions Monday morning about Trump’s proposal for extended benefits.
But Republican N.C. House Speaker Tim Moore said it’s “critical” to bring the expanded benefits to North Carolina.
“There needs to be a balance struck,” Moore said. “I do think if there are jobs available where folks are needing people to work, then there ought to be incentive for people to go back to work when there’s a job available. At the same time, there’s people who have lost their jobs through absolutely no fault of their own, people who have worked all their lives who need that help.”
A spokeswoman for Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper, Dory MacMillan, said Congress should have acted instead because Trump’s executive order comes with a notable downside.
Since only Congress is allowed to approve new spending, Trump’s plan would pay for the extra unemployment benefits by taking money out of FEMA’s disaster relief fund.
“States shouldn’t be forced to choose which disaster victims to help,” MacMillan wrote in an email. “Depleting money set aside for natural disasters like hurricanes and tornadoes is a bad way to help the unemployed, especially when forecasters predict high hurricane activity. Congress needs to set aside partisanship to restore unemployment payments and fight the pandemic.”
On Monday, White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany addressed concerns like that, saying there are provisions in place to make sure Trump’s plan wouldn’t take too much money away from FEMA.
“We’ll make sure that two things happen: That Americans get paid, but there is enough money there to safely go through hurricane season,” she said.
NC could use CARES Act funding
A spokesperson for the N.C. Division of Employment Security, Kerry McComber, said it’s still unclear how the program Trump proposed would work, if North Carolina were to opt in. Answers are still unavailable to questions like when it might begin, if the payments could be made retroactively, if the state legislature would have to sign off, or how much it might cost the state.
“DES is unable to provide details about how this program would be administered until we receive more guidance from the U.S. Department of Labor,” she wrote in an email. “We’ll provide more information after it becomes available.”
McEnany said the federal government will put together an application process for states to go through “close to immediately” if they decide to participate in the program. She said she believed they could pay into the program using various sources of funding, including “CARES funding or even existing unemployment funds.”
North Carolina has a large surplus fund for unemployment, after cutting benefits in 2013. That fund, which is separate from the overall state budget, has around $3 billion in reserve. Moore, however, indicated Monday that he would prefer to use money from the CARES Act, the federal coronavirus relief package.
North Carolina got $3.5 billion in CARES Act funding earlier this year, and so far lawmakers have spent around half.
“That’s why we didn’t spend all the CARES money — because we didn’t know what else would come from the feds,” Moore said.
It’s unclear what might happen with issues like evictions, utility shutoffs and the like if the federal benefits remain stopped while large sectors of the economy remain shut down — particularly in North Carolina, where unemployment benefits are lower than in most of the rest of the nation in terms of both weekly payments and the number of weeks people are allowed to receive them.
In North Carolina, the now-defunct $600-per-week federal benefits applied to more types of unemployed workers than state benefits did. They were also nearly double the weekly maximum of $350 that the state pays. So most of the money going to unemployed people since the start of the pandemic has been from the federal government.
According to data from the state unemployment office, North Carolinians received $5.2 billion in federal unemployment benefits before those benefits ended at the start of August. That’s more than triple the $1.5 billion that unemployed people got from the state government in that same period.
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This story was originally published August 10, 2020 at 1:41 PM.
