Unemployment benefits expire for millions without pushback from Biden

The $1.9 trillion economic aid package Biden signed in March included extended and expanded benefits for unemployed workers, including a weekly $300 federal supplement to state jobless payments, additional weeks of assistance for the long-term unemployed and the extension of a special program to provide benefits to so-called gig workers who traditionally do not qualify for unemployment benefits. Monday’s expiration means that 7.5 million people will lose their benefits entirely and another 3 million will lose the weekly $300 supplement.

Republicans and small-business owners have assailed efforts to extend aid, contending that it has held back the economic recovery and fueled a labour shortage by discouraging people from looking for work. Liberal Democrats and progressive groups have pushed for another round of aid, saying millions of Americans remain vulnerable and in need of help.

Biden and his advisers have pointedly refused to call on Congress to extend the benefits further, a decision that reflects the prevailing view of the state of the recovery inside the administration and the president’s desire to focus on winning support for his broader economic agenda.

Biden’s most senior economic advisers say the economy is in the process of completing a handoff between federal assistance and the labour market: As support from the March stimulus law wanes, they say, more and more Americans are set to return to work, drawing paychecks that will power consumer spending in the place of government aid.

And Biden is pushing Congress this month to pass two measures that constitute a multitrillion-dollar agenda focused on longer-run economic growth: a bipartisan infrastructure bill and a larger, partisan spending bill with investments in child care, education, carbon reduction and more. That push leaves no political oxygen for an additional short-term aid bill, which White House officials insist the economy does not need.

Administration officials say money that continues to flow to Americans from the March law, including new monthly payments to parents, will continue to sustain the social safety net even as the expanded federal jobless aid expires. Biden has called on certain states — those with high unemployment rates and a willingness to continue aid to jobless workers — to use state relief funds from the March law to help the long-term unemployed. So far, no state has said it plans to do so.

On Sunday, Biden’s chief of staff, Ron Klain, told CNN’s “State of the Union” that the March law was also allowing states to help those out of work by offering employment bonuses and job training and counselling.

“We think the jobs are there,” Klain said, “and we think the states have the resources they need to move people from unemployment to employment.”

Biden has faced criticism from the left and the right on the issue, and he has responded with a balancing act, supporting the benefits as approved by Congress but declining to push to extend them — or to defend them against attacks by leaders in some states.

Throughout the summer, business lobbyists and Republican lawmakers called on the president to cut off the benefits early, blaming them for the difficulties some businesses were facing in hiring workers, particularly in lower-paying industries such as hospitality. Soon after the backlash began, Biden defended the benefits but called on the Labor Department to ensure that unemployed workers who declined job offers would lose their aid.

But roughly half of the states, nearly all of them led by Republican governors, moved to cut off benefits early on their own. Biden and his administration did not fight them, angering progressives. The administration is essentially extending that policy into the fall, by calling on only willing states to fill in for expired assistance.

“I don’t think we necessarily need a blanket policy for unemployment benefits at this point around the country,” Labor Secretary Martin Walsh said in an interview Friday, “because states are in different places.”

Privately, some administration officials have expressed openness to the idea that economic research will eventually show the benefits had some sort of chilling effect on workers’ decision to take jobs. Critics of the extra unemployment benefits have argued that they are discouraging people from returning to work at a time when there are a record number of job openings and many businesses are struggling to hire.

Progressives in and outside of Congress have grown frustrated with the administration’s approach to the benefits, warning it could backfire economically. Job growth slowed in August as the delta variant spread across the country.

“Millions of jobless workers are going to suffer when benefits expire on Monday, and it didn’t need to be this way,” Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., chair of the Finance Committee, said in a news release last week. “It’s clear from the economic and health conditions on the ground that we shouldn’t be cutting off benefits now.”

Elizabeth Ananat, a Barnard College economist who has been studying the impact of the pandemic on low-wage workers, said that cutting off benefits now, when the delta variant has threatened to set back the recovery, is a threat to both workers and the broader economy.

“We’ve got this fragile economic recovery, and now we’re going to cut income from people who need it, and we are pulling back dollars out of an economy that is still pretty unsteady,” she said.