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Extending unemployment benefits under the authority of President Donald Trump's recent executive order that would provide $300 a week to people recently receiving an extra $600 won't be easy or fast, said Pennsylvania's secretary of labor in a virtual news conference Tuesday.
"They're forcing us to recreate the wheel," Secretary Jerry Oleksiak said. "We need Congress to do the right thing and extend the Federal Pandemic Unemployment Compensation benefits (instead)."
The program might take a month or more to set up, wouldn't help 30,000 Pennsylvanians who have been getting less than $100 a week in unemployment compensation and probably would last for no more than five weeks, according to Oleksiak.
"It's a convoluted program -- a Band-Aid -- rather than an actual solution," Oleksiak said.
Still, the state is preparing an application for the funding, the secretary said.
"(But) we don't have full information yet," said Susan Dickinson, director of unemployment compensation benefits policy.
The department will need to build a new processing system because the money for the program would come from a fund in the Federal Emergency Management Agency, not regular unemployment compensation sources, Oleksiak said.
It would violate the law to "intermingle" those funds, Dickinson said.
The challenges of setting up the program will include determining which regular UC recipients qualify by virtue of being unemployed due to COVID-19, who gets paid for which weeks and who gets retroactive payments as far back as Aug. 1, Dickinson said.
"There are a lot of different factors," she said. "It's a bit time-consuming."
State officials haven't yet decided whether Pennsylvania would add an extra $100 to supplement the federal benefit, bringing weekly payments to $400, Oleksiak said.
"It's a work in progress," he said.