California workers would see $400 extra in weekly unemployment benefits following an executive order signed by President Donald Trump — but to speed the money to the jobless amid coronavirus-linked economic woes, Gov. Gavin Newsom said Monday the state would have to cough up $700 million a week.
The state also would have to reprogram a primitive EDD computer system that is already haunted by tech gremlins such as freezes and glitches as it reels from a tsunami of claims from workers who have lost their jobs due to business shutdowns ordered by the government to combat the deadly bug.
The president signed a series of executive orders in recent days that included a provision to add $400 a week to the normal state unemployment benefits, but the order also obliged states to pay $100 of that amount.
Newsom, however, said Monday during a regular news briefing to discuss the state’s response to the coronavirus that California is too impoverished to come up with the 25 percent share of the additional $400 payment.
“The state does not have an identified resource of $700 million a week that we haven’t already obliged,” Newsom said. “There is no money sitting in the piggy bank from the previous CARES act.”
The additional $400 would be a huge benefit for California workers who have lost their jobs, adding to the average weekly benefit in the state of $305. The maximum benefit without the supplement is $450.
The governor emphasized that massive cuts would have to be made in other state programs to come up with the California share of the unemployment benefits.
“That would create a burden the likes of which a state even as large as California could not absorb,” Newsom said.
The governor also suggested that the EDD’s archaic computer system — based on a decades-old programming language called Cobol — might stagger beneath additional burdens if it had to be reworked to accommodate a $400 payment.
“We would have to reprogram a system that is well-defined as hardly perfect at EDD,” Newsom said.
The EDD has estimated that it might require three to four weeks to reprogram its creaky computer systems to shift from adding an extra $400 payment rather than the extra $600 in federal extra payments that ended in late July. The state would also have to scout for an assured funding source.
“All of those burdens would create time delays and enormous consternation for millions of those who would seek those benefits,” Newsom said.
The EDD, however, has already created considerable consternation on its own because of the state agency’s failure to promptly pay benefits to a huge chunk of the 7.31 million California workers who have filed first-time unemployment claims from mid-March through Aug. 1.
The embattled state agency has spawned a mammoth backlog of unpaid claims that has delayed payments to as many as 1.13 million California workers.
Newsom said California needs federal cash to accomplish the $400 payments. The governor — who has been vowing for months to fix the broken call centers and inadequate computer systems at the EDD — said he didn’t want to launch into a new program that might suffer further glitches.
“I recognize the magnitude of the challenge and the burden that we already have with our unemployment system,” Newsom said.
