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Last week, the Supreme Court cancelled the federal suspension of deportation, which is one of the strongest parts of the social safety net established by the government last year to ease the impact of the economic recession caused by the coronavirus. Without this protection, millions of Americans across the country are now in danger of being driven out of their homes.

This is a surprising state of affairs, especially considering how much the federal government has spent on pandemic relief: after more than $5 trillion and 17 months later, why so many Americans are still on the cutting edge, and what is What does the long-term solution crisis look like? This is what people say.

The threat of mass evictions has been looming over the country since March 2020, when the pandemic put tens of millions of Americans out of work in response to an expanded but still dysfunctional unemployment insurance system.

Congress imposed a moratorium, but it lapsed in July 2020, prompting the Trump administration to intervene: The former president argued in an executive order that if people are driven out of their homes and forced to move away, mass deportations may result Leading to a surge in infections, gathering with relatives or moving into homeless shelters.

The new moratorium depends on the powers of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, not the powers of Congress, and it limits the ability of landlords to evict tenants whose income is below certain thresholds or cannot pay rent due to medical or financial difficulties. Tenants must prove, usually in court, that they have sought rental assistance and have nowhere to live if they are evicted.

Status: According to National Equity Atlas, as of August, nearly 6.2 million households were in arrears of $16.8 billion in rent. Since December last year, Congress has allocated more, about 46.5 billion U.S. dollars for emergency rental assistance, but only 5.1 billion U.S. dollars has been paid.

Why? The bureaucracy is overburdened for one reason: As reported by The Times, the United States has never had a federal system to keep Americans at home, so it must be established immediately, and the results are conceivably terrible.

"The problem is not the Treasury Department; it is the state and the local that should allocate aid," the Washington Post editorial board wrote. "Some states had to build distribution systems from scratch. Others were overwhelmed by applicants. Technical glitches have been plagued by application sites."

Peter Hepburn, the head of the deportation tracking system at the Princeton Deportation Laboratory, stated in the June Times that the method of distributing funds to the states also has major flaws. Congress allocates funds based on the population of each state, regardless of differences in the number of tenants, rental costs, or the degree of difficulty associated with the pandemic, and also stipulates minimum fees to be paid to smaller states.

Hepburn explained: “The result is that renters in smaller rural states will receive more assistance than larger urban states — these states are in many cases hardest hit by the pandemic.” “If Dividing the maximum aid allocated to each state by the number of rental units, each renting household in New York will receive $766, compared to $5,167 in Wyoming."

Another problem stems from restrictions on who can apply for assistance, Sema K. Sgaier and Aaron Dibner-Dunlap wrote in The Times. They estimate that half of the 6.2 million households that owe money have made too much money to receive assistance. "As a result," they said, "at-risk households in almost every county still fall behind catastrophically."

In an ideal world, David Dane, editor of American Outlook, wrote that states only need to allocate the remaining 89% of rental assistance funds to Congress in a timely manner: "If this money is distributed in a reasonable proportion, There will be no crisis at all."

However, whether countries have the ability to meet the challenges is still an open question. Officials in the Biden administration have said that payments accelerated in August, but they admitted that they were not fast enough to completely stop the wave of evictions. As far as Dayen is concerned, he believes that the flaws of the program are inherent in its decentralized design and cannot be easily fixed.

Last week, a group of Democratic lawmakers cited the lack of progress in a letter calling on congressional leadership to pass legislation to extend the moratorium, and the Supreme Court is unlikely to overturn the bill. The Biden administration also called on states and localities to implement their own moratorium on deportation orders for at least the next two months, just as New Jersey and Washington, DC have done.

Although corporate landlords have made huge profits in recent months, approximately 40% of rental units in the United States are owned by individual “spouse” investors, many of whom are struggling to pay their bills and mortgages.

"The longer the ban lasts," Jonathan O'Connell reported for the Washington Post this month. "The more small independent landlords — many of them senior citizens — may run out Save up and move on", sell the real estate to Wall Street support and foreign investors.

Allocating the entire $46.5 billion in rental assistance will help prevent these losses, but the National Association of Apartments, a landlord organization, said that even the full amount is not enough to pay the landlord’s rent owed. The group filed a lawsuit with the government at the end of last month, demanding an additional US$26.6 billion.

It was pressure from landlord groups that helped House Democrats cancel their efforts to extend the federal eviction ban in July. Even if the measure can now overcome the opposition of the more conservative members of the party, its chances of clearing the 60-vote threshold in the Senate are slim.

In order to break the deadlock, Gary Painter, a professor of public policy at the University of Southern California, believes that Congress should develop a federally funded and operated loan program. Unlike the current rent assistance program, it can provide immediate relief to tenants and landlords, and by requiring tenants to repay the rent within 10 years, it can win the support of the Republican Party.

"At this point," he wrote, "only Washington has the scale and scope to stop a crisis. The cost of this crisis may reach tens of billions, with profound long-term effects on renters."

The moratorium on evictions is not the only source of pandemic relief that is currently drying up. The federal reform of unemployment insurance — expanded eligibility, increased by $300 a week, and extended benefits — will expire on September 6. Americans who lose their employer-sponsored health insurance and are eligible for six months of free premiums will see those benefits lapse on September 30. And in January, the tens of millions of Americans with student loan debts who have not had to pay monthly payments since March last year will have to start doing so again.

Not everyone believes that the end of the moratorium on evictions means disaster. Howard Husock, a senior researcher at the American Enterprise Institute, said in the New York Post in July: “The owner is likely to be evicted only as a last resort.” “The reason is simple: the car owner can’t be sure whether it can be. Find alternatives. For landlords who rely on rental income to maintain their buildings and pay their own bills—think thousands of couples landlords—vacant units are their biggest fear."

But others are not so optimistic. An analysis released by Goldman Sachs on Sunday concluded that if Congress does not take action or speed up the payment of rent assistance, approximately 750,000 families will face eviction by the end of this year. Analysis shows that these evictions will in turn increase the vacancy rate and offset some of the pressure from the housing shortage.

"These 750,000 households have not just magically disappeared. Why does the total vacancy rate increase under stagnant housing conditions?" Darrell Owens, a housing policy analyst at YIMBY, California, wrote on Twitter. "Because the plan is to make them homeless."

Do you have any views we missed? Email us at debtable@nytimes.com. Please indicate your name, age, and location in your response. This information may be included in the next newsletter.

"The moratorium on eviction orders is written for perfect tenants. They are usually hard to find." [New Republic]

"A landlord said her tenants were intimidating her. She couldn't evict them." [New York Times]

"The ban on expulsion cannot be made permanent" [Bloomberg]

"Study: Ending the moratorium on evictions will increase the risk of Covid-19" [Massachusetts Institute of Technology]

"The pandemic safety net is falling apart. What to do?" [New York Times]

Here is what readers think of the last debate: A nuclear option for climate change?

John Hall, a former congressman from New York, said: “Nuclear power plants rely on water from rivers, lakes, estuaries, and oceans to cool the core and prevent meltdown. As the world warms, all these bodies of water may become too hot to complete. This work. In fact, several nuclear power plants in the United States and Europe have been out of service during the heat wave because the water they are in is too cold to cool the fission nuclear fuel."

David from Maryland: "A large part of the cost of building a new nuclear power plant is meeting environmental and regulatory requirements. Some of these requirements are the result of legislation and regulations based on a lack of understanding of nuclear power generation. This regulatory environment needs to be reviewed and improved. "