With Democrats in control of both Congress and the White House, it’s perhaps a little unsurprising that there’s a contingent of lawmakers who are already pressing President Joe Biden to get moving on yet another round of coronavirus relief payments to the American people. Yes, that would be stimulus check #4, with two groups of Democratic legislators — 11 from the Senate, and 53 from the House of Representatives, according to the latest tally — who favor another wave of stimulus checks.
This news comes, of course, with the third round of stimulus checks still underway now, a distribution that finds millions of Americans newly in receipt of a check for $1,400 or more, and with more of those checks on the way as part of this current disbursement. Along those lines, in fact, there’s at least one group of people still waiting on a stimulus check update, despite tens of millions of checks having already been sent out so far — namely, Social Security recipients, many of whom say they’re getting desperate and need that money immediately.
This, despite the fact that the IRS has touted the speed with which it’s pushed out the third round of stimulus checks, which the agency says has reached Americans in “record time.”
According to a March 24 letter from a House committee to the Social Security Administration, some 30 million Social Security recipients were still waiting to receive their stimulus checks. The SSA had apparently been asked by the IRS to send payment files to the tax agency two weeks before President Biden signed the $1.9 trillion stimulus legislation into law on March 11.
However, “as of today, SSA still has not provided the IRS with the payment files that are needed to issue (stimulus checks) to these struggling Americans,” the House committee letter says.
Good news, though; that letter was followed up by notice that congressional lawmakers said they received just one day later, on March 25, from the SSA — that the benefits agency, that morning, had just sent payment details for 30 million Social Security recipients to the IRS. Fast forward to Monday of this week, with the tax agency confirming that it has received the payment data on those Social Security beneficiaries, with the IRS giving a somewhat open-ended promise stating that “we anticipate proceeding to make the payment soon.”
@BillPascrell You all told the IRS you wouldn’t tolerate further delays on federal beneficiaries receiving their 3rd stimulus.
I am on SSDI & we STILL don’t have a date for pymt.
Sir, im in a rough spot. Please don’t drop the ball on this.
This. Needs. Attention#GiveUsADate
— 💙 Koko ✊🏻✊🏽✊🏿💙 (@Kokomothegreat) March 29, 2021
Andrew Saul and David Black, the Trump holdovers running Social Security, delayed the stimulus checks of 30M seniors and people with disabilities.@POTUS, it’s time to stop the sabotage. #FireSaulAndBlack https://t.co/AayQwCaEdz
— SocialSecurityWorks (@SSWorks) March 29, 2021
No surprise, given the usual dynamics in Washington DC, a bit of finger-pointing has accompanied the delay in getting stimulus payments to Social Security recipients.
House Democrats, for example, blame a lack of urgency from SSA commissioner Andrew Saul, a holdover from President Donald Trump’s administration. But Saul, however, released a statement a few days ago blaming the delay on his agency not receiving sufficient funding and the presence of too much red tape that got in the way of the SSA working seamlessly with the IRS and the Treasury Department to coordinate things in the lead-up to the stimulus legislation’s passage.