President Donald Trump announced over the weekend that if Congress wouldn’t extend the $600 enhanced unemployment insurance, he would do something himself.
“I’m taking action to provide an additional or an extra $400 per week in expanded benefits,” Trump said Saturday at his golf club in New Jersey.
But $400 is not $600, which is what the benefit was until it expired at the end of July. And it turns out the extra $400 is actually just $300, unless states feel like adding another $100. And the money isn’t technically an unemployment benefit, possibly because it’s legally dubious. And it could take weeks for states to deliver.
The president’s memorandum tells governors they can apply to set up a brand-new “lost wages assistance program” through the Federal Emergency Management Agency. The program would operate in tandem with state unemployment systems, some of which took weeks and months to deliver federal benefits earlier this year.
If any laid-off workers watching the president’s news conference over the weekend thought they were about to get paid, they might wind up disappointed. | 
