Joe Biden asked, Thursday, July 29, the US Congress to extend the moratoriums that prevent rental evictions in the United States and run until July 31, announced the White House, in full rise in contaminations because of the Delta variant.
This moratorium was put in place in September 2020 by the Centers for Disease Prevention and Control (CDC), the main federal public health agency in the United States.
“Keep people in their homes and out of crowded or gathering places – like homeless shelters – preventing evictions is a key step in helping to stop the spread of Covid-19 ”, detail the CDC on their website.
It succeeded the one planned in March 2020 by the Trump administration and Congress, to prevent the millions of people who had lost their jobs because of the pandemic from being homeless. It was then extended several times.
Corn “A Supreme Court decision ruled that“clear and specific authorization from Congress (…) would be needed for the CDC to extend the moratorium beyond July 31” “, regrets White House spokeswoman Jen Psaki in her press release.
Speed up the payment of aid
Joe Biden also asked the departments of housing and urban development, agriculture, and veterans, who manage the rental of some housing, “To extend their respective moratoria until the end of September”, she specifies.
The Treasury Department, for its part, called on Wednesday to accelerate the payment to tenants of funds provided by the federal government to help them pay their rent.
Of the 46 billion dollars made available to states and local communities to help tenants in difficulty financially, only 3 billion actually arrived in the bank accounts of the latter, confirmed to Agence France-Presse a responsible for the Treasury.
Some Republicans, however, accuse Joe Biden of having waited until the last moment to act. “We’re three days away from the end of the unconstitutional moratorium on CDC expulsions, and what is President Biden’s solution?” Blame the Court and call on Congress to fix it ”, deplored the Republican Vice-President of the Financial Services Commission of the House of Representatives, Patrick McHenry. He stressed that the Republican members of this commission had established a text to be able to extend the moratorium, but did not receive a response.