An additional $ 300 a week in federal unemployment benefits will likely take a few weeks to reach out to workers and funding could be depleted a month and a half later, a Labor official said.
The official said states should be able to start making the payments after applying for funding from the Federal Emergency Management Agency and making technical changes to systems to distribute the money. Based on the current number of recipients of unemployment benefits, the official said the $ 44 billion in funds allocated to the enhanced benefits could be spent in five or six weeks, if all states participate.
That timeline would put the benefits on pace to expire sooner than the end of December in Saturday’s executive action set by President Trump.
More than 30 million workers received some form of unemployment benefits in the week ending July 18, the Labor Department said last week.
State unemployment systems need to make changes to their technology to begin addressing the additional unemployment benefits included in the executive action signed by President Trump, the Labor official said. The official expected that the technological changes would be less burdensome than when states had to roll out new federal programs for extended unemployment benefits in March, including the $ 600-a-week in benefits that expired at the end of July.
.
