Congressional Inaction Exacerbates Hardship

By Stacy Dean, Crystal Fitzsimons, Zoë Neuberger, Dottie Rosenbaum and Etienne Melcher Philbin for CBPP.

Effective Tools Are Available and Should Be Used

As evidence of profound hardship resulting from the COVID-19 health and economic crises mounts, powerful tools to mitigate suffering and bolster economic activity will be unavailable to state and local government without congressional action.

A prime example is Pandemic EBT (P-EBT) – a new program, enacted in March 2020 and set to expire at the end of September 2020, that gives families benefits they can use to buy groceries to replace the free breakfasts and lunches their children missed while schools were closed due to the pandemic.

Extending P-EBT in combination with other measures to provide more food assistance, increase income, and stabilize housing would provide ongoing needed relief.

But congressional inaction has stymied P-EBT’s extension and other federal supports that would mitigate hardship, including:

• Provide a temporary 15% in SNAP benefits

• Extend the federal supplement to unemployment benefits through January 2021

• Provide assistance to meet the housing needs of people with low incomes; rental assistance funding to prevent evictions; funding for existing federal rental assistance programs; and additional funding for homeless services programs

Hardship is falling disproportionately on Black and Latino families as a result of longstanding inequities and structural racism, so programs that mitigate hardship would especially help these households.