Biden Administration's Work on Pandemic Relief Builds on New America Findings

As Congress and the new administration mull a third stimulus check, it’s hard to believe that only ten months ago in April 2020, our New Practice Lab in New America’s Public Interest Technology division published an article exposing serious problems with the ad hoc stimulus distribution process. As we reported, The Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act was designed to provide economic impact payments to American households of individuals who earned less than $99,000 or $198,000 for joint filers and $500 per child under the age of 17. A total of about 214 million people were expected to receive EIPs, but it soon became clear that only about half of those who qualified would receive their checks electronically in a timely manner. This group included Social Security recipients and Veterans Administration beneficiaries, who automatically received their stimulus money. The rest would receive their EIP in the form of a check that would take several months to arrive. There was also a group of Americans -- those who had not recently filed taxes and were not Social Security or VA benefit recipients who would not receive checks until they filed an electronic or paper-based tax return, a fact most of them didn’t realize. The IRS sought to solve this problem by creating a self-service tool for non-filers, but this created even more issues.

Our research team at New America, led by Gabriel Zucker, examined the issues and came up with simple, common sense solutions that would ensure adequate delivery of stimulus funds. These included five specific actions that the IRS could take immediately to improve stimulus payment processing and execution. These include:

• Communicating when and how Americans would receive payments
• Automating payments to certain non-filer groups
• Creating and executing a strategy to get payments to ten million other non-filers
• Creating and executing a strategy to expedite payments to 65 million families who lack direct deposit
• Creating and execute a strategy to get payments to eight million unbanked families

Though the IRS addressed some of the issues raised after the article’s publication, there was still significant work to be done to ensure that all allocated stimulus funds would actually be transferred to struggling families across the country. As of July 2020, tens of millions of Americans were still waiting to receive their stimulus payments.

The persistent challenges encountered in delivering payments is why we were excited to see the recommendations we made make their way into the new administration’s priorities. During one of the first press conferences under President Biden’s administration’ press secretary Jen Psaki was questioned about Americans who had not yet received stimulus checks. National Economic Director Brian Deese spoke about the need to address issues encountered by non-filers in accessing payments that New America first identified back in April, making it clear that solving this issue would be a priority for the President and his new administration. In Deese’s words, an executive order by Biden will, “direct the Department of Treasury to consider… creating an online portal that would allow people to easily identify if they’re eligible,” and doing outreach to communities with high numbers of non-filers. We are encouraged that the new administration understands how important this is, including the importance of expanding and improving the portal that was already created.

The Public Interest Technology team at New America is also pleased to see that the new administration is making this issue a priority, and we are proud of our team’s work researching this issue and advocating for progress to be made to close the loophole. Notably, we would like to recognize the work of Tara Dawson McGuinness, Gabriel Zucker, and Nina Olson, who collectively published several pieces (including this blog and this one) about stimulus check administration, as well as conducted outreach to elected officials.