(CN) — Three Ohio residents sued Republican Governor Mike DeWine and the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services Director Matt Damschroder Tuesday over the state’s decision to yank its participation in all federally backed pandemic unemployment programs.
Like countless others around the country, Ohioans Shawnee Huff, Candy Bowling and David Willis found themselves jobless during the Covid-19 pandemic. While they once served as a call center worker, inspector and landscaper respectively, all three were laid off due to the pandemic and turned to the benefits available under the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act to keep up with the bills.
The three Ohio residents, who have been using their pandemic unemployment benefits to pay for things like rent, service animal expenses and food, now say those benefits are being taken from them too quickly.
In May, DeWine announced he was pulling the state’s participation in the myriad of pandemic-related unemployment insurance programs, saying that the benefits were no longer necessary given how far the country had come in its fight against the virus.
"When this program was put in place, it was a lifeline for many Americans at a time when the only weapon we had in fighting the virus was to slow its spread through social distancing, masking, and sanitization," DeWine said in a statement at the time. “That is no longer the case.”
DeWine’s announcement meant that access to a number of benefits, such as a weekly $300 federal unemployment payment, would no longer be on the table for Ohioans who needed help in an economy rocked by the global outbreak.
In a lawsuit filed Tuesday Huff, Bowling and Willis say that these benefits are being stripped from them before they legally have to be.
In their 11-page complaint, the three point to the fact that some of the programs under the CARES Act are not set to expire until later this year in September. But the governor, according the complaint, is jumping the gun by having those benefits expire for residents of his state roughly two months before their set expiration date.
The plaintiffs say that if the governor succeeds in terminating or cutting back on those programs too soon, they will be unable to pay for their most crucial needs.
“Should the Defendants succeed in terminating these benefits more than two months early, Plaintiffs will suffer immediate, substantial, and irreparable harms for which they have no adequate remedy at law,” the complaint states.
The plaintiffs are asking a judge to declare that DeWine’s decision violated his statutory duties under the law and to order the state to immediately resume its participation in the CARES Act insurance benefit programs.
Ohio’s decision to withdraw early from the Covid-19 unemployment programs is not unprecedented.
Several states, including Indiana, New Hampshire and Mississippi have all ended their participation in those programs in some fashion or another and several more are primed to follow. Reports suggest that by the end of July, 26 states — of which only one, Louisiana, is run by a Democratic governor — will have severed themselves from the federal program before the official expiration date in the fall.
Representatives for the defendants did not immediately respond to requests for comment Tuesday evening.
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