$1.2B of FEMA jobless aid coming in days, after weeks of delays

The state labor department said it’s paying out $1.2 billion in federal unemployment relief payments in the coming days, following weeks of delays for more than 800,000 unemployed New Jerseyans.

State labor officials said on Thursday morning that residents will receive the money in one lump-sum payment “over the next two business days.”

These new checks come in at $300 a week from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and cover up to six weeks of unemployment in August and September, capped at $1,800 total.

“Processing these payments required us to develop new programming that had not been tested previously, and it took longer than anticipated for the payments to go through,” New Jersey Labor and Workforce Development Commissioner Robert Asaro-Angelo said in a Thursday announcement. “Our team worked around the clock to get this extra help to hundreds of thousands of people in our state who are in dire need because COVID-19 has upended their work situations.”

All told, more than 1.7 million New Jerseyans have filed for unemployment since mid-March, when Gov. Phil Murphy enacted a sweeping host of shutdowns, travel restrictions and business closures that drove unemployment to a record-high 16.8% in June.

According to Thursday morning data from the federal labor department, 27,654 New Jerseyans filed unemployment claims the week ending Oct. 17, down from 28,729 claims the for week ending Oct. 10.

For the week ending March 21, 2020, more than 155,000 New Jerseyans filed for unemployment, followed by 206,253 the following week and 214,836 New Jerseyans the first week of April.

Only in September did the unemployment rate fall below Great Recession levels, hitting a benchmark of 6.7% that month. Data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics show that during the Great Recession the jobless rate topped off at 9.8% from November 2009 to January 2010.

The state labor department estimates that an average of $12,000 has been paid out per worker. Roughly 1.45 million New Jerseyans have qualified, and 96% of them have received at least one unemployment check. Still, that leaves out 58,000 residents who have not yet gotten a single unemployment check. State officials have not commented on those delays, saying the individual circumstances are specific to that person.

Since March, the state paid out almost $17 billion in jobless benefits, most of it through an added $600 a week that came out of the $2.2 trillion Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security Act.

President Donald Trump enacted the FEMA aid program over the summer, after the CARES Act’s Pandemic Unemployment Assistance program expired at the end of July.

Republicans and Democrats in Washington have locked horns over a future iteration of the COVID-19 relief package. Democrats in the U.S. Senate blocked a Republican-backed $500 billion relief package that included $300 a week in unemployment relief. But, House Democrats are reportedly in talks this week with U.S Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin over a $1.8 billion stimulus package, which would include $400 a week, as opposed to the continuation of $600 a week that Congressional Democrats have sought.

“Folks are desperate. Something has to get done. We’ve got to stop playing politics with this and get this done,” Murphy said on Oct. 15 on CNBC segment “Squawk Box.”