When you are loudly proclaiming the success of your very big program and that program, in reality, turns out not to be very successful, or even very big, then people are going to lose faith that anyone or anything is coming to help at all. That's the hole the Biden administration is digging now.
“June Emergency Rental Assistance Resources to Households More Than All Previous Months Combined,” the headline blared, highlighting the more than $1.5 billion in payments delivered, and triple the number of households helped relative to April. It sounds like a real achievement if you don’t know the denominator; that is, the total amount of rental assistance Congress approved in relief bills last December and this March. That number is $46.5 billion, which means that the June total amounted to a little over 3 percent of available funds.
It’s a simple math equation to get to what Politico figured out, that in the first six months since rental assistance was made available, only 6.5 percent of the funds have been distributed. At this rate, the money would dribble out between now and 2028.
Renters don’t have that kind of time. Next Saturday, July 31, the federal moratorium on evictions expires, and the Biden administration opposes an extension. In a world where rental assistance is flowing and the economy booming, policymakers could rest easy that a spurt of evictions will not ensue. But that reality only exists on charts and unofficial estimates.
The first of the month is coming again. (There's one every month!) And this one is gonna be a doozy. With seven million potential evictions hanging out there and a new COVID surge threatening lives and livelihoods, Biden opposes an extension of the eviction moratorium. Meanwhile states are rushing to cut off unemployment benefits early.* Joe Biden isn't doing anything to stop them.
Biden and his team pushed back on the idea that the federal benefits were to blame for a sudden shortage of workers, but they quickly changed course, with White House press secretary Jen Psaki ultimately saying that Republican governors “have every right to” reject the pandemic unemployment money.
That's not the whole story: 22 governors decided they would stop paying the PUA assistance for self-employed workers. As Sen. Bernie Sanders, Ind.-Vt., pointed out at the time, “Congress did not grant states the ability to strip PUA benefits away from vulnerable workers.”
Sanders told Biden’s Labor Secretary Marty Walsh that he had an obligation “to ensure this aid gets to workers.” Instead, an unnamed Biden administration official told CNN: “There is nothing we can do.”
There's nothing we can do, it's out of our hands, and the governors "have every right" to screw you over. But aren't we doing a great job? We delivered $1.5 billion in payments! If we didn't know better we might think they are actually trying to get people to give up hope. But we know better. That can't possibly be what the goal is here. I mean it's not like they'd just up and "declare independence" from a pandemic even while it still rages out of control across the globe. That wouldn't make any sense.
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