Federal COVID Grants Available but Slow

2020 was a year of many things. Future generations may remember it as the year that the United States of America spent multiple trillions of dollars, and no one really knows where any of this money went, except into the pockets of billionaires. This isn't some piece maligning or pointing out any supposed corruption; this is all about tracking all of the grants that never got paid out as promised. You see, a lot of people only know about the trillions of dollars that government spent with the CAREs Act and the other huge spending bills. They don't know about all the other billions of dollars allocated specifically for business grants and farming grants and all sorts of other grant initiatives. Nobody knows where these grants are at.

The reasoning with the government was simple enough to understand: The big money, like CAREs, was going to go to states so that states could specifically figure out the best way to implement the money. After all, the federal government doesn't know what's happening day to day on the ground in every community, but the thinking was that states did, and states knew how to spend that money. For citizens and businesses, government also set aside additional billions to hand out federal grants. The problem here, as mentioned, is that no one really knows where this grant money is at.

Many people who applied for grants well over a year ago are still waiting to hear back, which means most of them have likely been outright denied and nobody is available to simply tell them this information. However, other people who were awarded grants many months ago are still wondering when that money's coming through. This has been the case earlier this week in states like Maryland, New York and Illinois. People who have received thousands of dollars in federal government grants, at least on paper, have not received this money and are now losing their businesses and homes because the money never came through.

So, what is taking so long? Proponents of the current federal government claim that everything is just taking longer since the pandemic hit. People are getting tax extensions from the IRS. Sex offenders in most states are given leniency on having to fill out yearly registration forms. Down the list one can go and find the wheels turning a lot slower than usual. So, per that sort of reasoning, it's perfectly logical to conclude that the grants are also taking much longer.

However, if this is the case, and it's just government too backed up, that really stands out as a stain upon government. After all, it was 100% government's fault that these people need grants. Government shut down people's businesses; people did not do this voluntarily. So there are a lot of critics out there calling for blood, claiming that the government is responsible for this, so the government should have set up a newer, speedier system to ensure that grants were approved and sent out as needed. The fact this has not happened yet has millions of people across the entire nation very angry at the process.

Different Virus, Same Government

Factually speaking, this just seems to be government as usual. A novel virus, but the same old federal apparatus that's been slow for generations. While there could be corruption at play, perhaps even a lot of it, no one has been able to track any misappropriation in how the funds were spent. Though more to that point: No one has been able to actually track how these funds were spent at all, or even if they have been spent. The fact of the matter is that tens of thousands of people out there are waiting on government grants. Not only to be approved, of course, but also to receive that money after approval. Things have slowed down so much that many people do not even realize that federal grants still exist for which they can apply. That's how broken the current system is.

Some economists have suggested a measure by which states pay out the grants through their CAREs Act money and then seek reimbursement from the government. Though because this might actually work, the likelihood that the government goes through with it is slim to none. No matter who's elected President or who sits in Congress, the government seems to drag its feet all the same. Though with a pandemic, this is the one time that they should really pick up the pace.