Quote:President Donald Trump is promising billions to help Texas rebuild from Hurricane Harvey, but his Republican allies in the House are looking at cutting almost $1 billion from disaster accounts to help finance the president’s border wall. The pending reduction to the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s disaster relief account is part of a spending bill that the House is scheduled to consider next week when Congress returns from its August recess. The $876 million cut, part of the 1,305-page measure’s homeland security section, pays for roughly half the cost of Trump’s down payment on a U.S.-Mexico border wall. It seems sure that GOP leaders will move to reverse the disaster aid cut next week. The optics are politically bad and there’s only $2.3 billion remaining in disaster coffers.

Quote:Don, a commercial boat captain in Sarasota, Florida, wasn’t on Twitter before the coronavirus pandemic. Recently, though, he decided to join; after weeks of struggling with his state’s unemployment insurance system, signing up for Twitter was a last-ditch attempt to make progress. “I googled how I can get ahold of the state, just looking for answers, and I saw some Twitter posts popping up,” he told me. Don, 47, and his wife both work for the same company and were laid off on March 18. They’ve spent weeks trying to navigate Florida’s unemployment system, dealing with crashing websites and blocked phone lines, sometimes calling hundreds of times a day. Three weeks ago, his wife was finally deemed eligible to start receiving benefits, but he’s still waiting. “There’s no rhyme or reason to it,” he said.

The coronavirus crisis, which so far has left more than 80,000 people dead in the United States and at least 33 million out of a job, has revealed many uncomfortable truths about America, including the country’s unemployment system: It is broken, and in many cases, it is broken by design. After years of disinvestment and underfunding, benefits systems across the country have been left starved and in disrepair. In many states, benefits are intentionally difficult to collect and application processes complex to navigate.

The system has been hobbling along, and now a crisis has hit, said Andrew Stettner, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation. “Then people realize we actually want this thing to work, and it doesn’t work in the way people thought it would.” That’s certainly been the case for Don, a father of 10-year-old twins who has just now encountered the unemployment program for the first time in his life. “I didn’t know that it was like this, and I didn’t know how terrible the system was to apply,” he said. “It’s sick the way that they set it up, and they just made the system to fail, which is what’s so disheartening to us.” “This is a kind of crisis that’s forced people to realize what the system is all about,” Stettner said.

• This is what you get when the state is run by people who don't believe in government by definition
  
• In fact, the whole US Covid-19 pandemic response is an example of that.