Maintaining robust, expanded unemployment insurance would relieve hardship that falls disproportionately on workers of color.

Far more people with health and financial worries during the COVID-19 pandemic likely would enroll in federal marketplace plans if given the chance.

Testimony of Jared Bernstein, Senior Fellow, Before the Joint Economic Committee

If policymakers fail to act, millions of low-income renters and people experiencing homelessness are likely to experience avoidable evictions, continued homelessness, or other preventable hardships.

Without new relief measures to help more struggling families afford rent and avoid eviction, millions of households could face housing instability, homelessness, and greater overall hardship in the coming months.

Watering down this core tenet of the Fair Housing Act essentially tells federal, state, and local policymakers that it’s okay to ignore discrimination.

The severe and unprecedented size of the health, human, and economic crisis caused by COVID-19 should determine the size of the legislative response.

The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and the Child Nutrition Programs (school, summer, and child care meals) are the only major entitlement programs whose beneficiaries risk two types of failures in the annual appropriations process: a government shutdown, especially at the beginning of the fiscal year, and annual funding that proves inadequate to cover the programs’ needs for the entire fiscal year. 

With the state budget crisis intensifying and states beginning to exhaust their options to defer budget cuts, they will likely make deeper and more widespread cuts to Medicaid and other health programs unless federal policymakers provide additional funds and maintain strong protections for Medicaid enrollees.

The next coronavirus relief package should both extend the relief measures that are working but are slated to end well before the crisis abates and address the shortcomings and missing elements in the relief efforts to date.

The next fiscal stimulus package should make the Child Tax Credit fully available to the 27 million children in low-income families who currently receive a partial tax credit or no credit at all because their families’ earnings are too low.

Key relief measures enacted so far during the pandemic have mitigated hardship for some families but left others behind.

A SNAP benefit increase is one of the highest bang-for-the-buck measures for economic stimulus to help support the economy. 

All of humanity suffered a huge loss yesterday with the passing of one of the greatest Americans of my lifetime, John Lewis.

About 12 million Americans risk missing out on the CARES Act’s stimulus payments because they did not receive payments automatically from the IRS.

Weakening continuous coverage would cause likely hundreds of thousands of people, including many who have recently lost their jobs, to lose coverage and become uninsured.