State cuts to pandemic unemployment benefits last summer had a small impact on hiring, suggesting enhanced funding for the unemployed didn’t play a big role in labor shortages, according to research.

The federal government greatly expanded the social safety net for the jobless in March 2020. It offered hundreds of dollars in additional weekly benefits to individuals and gave aid to millions of previously ineligible people, like gig workers and the self-employed.    

Congress can exclude residents of Puerto Rico from some federal disability benefits available to those who live in the 50 states, the Supreme Court ruled Thursday.

The 8-1 opinion was written by Justice Brett Kavanaugh, with Justice Sonia Sotomayor dissenting.

The case concerned Supplemental Security Income that is available to those living in the 50 states who are older than 65, blind or disabled. But residents of Puerto Rico and other US territories are excluded from receiving the funds.

As the 1960s came to their tumultuous end, California Gov. Ronald Reagan convened a summit on the topic of welfare. He was hoping to try out one of his new ideas: that poor single mothers were, in the wake of the civil rights movement, increasingly living idly and defrauding government assistance programs.

George Miller, then the welfare director in neighboring Nevada, volunteered to do a dry run for Reagan, proposing to purge his smaller state’s welfare rolls of alleged welfare cheats. It would be the first effort of its kind in the nation, he said.

The House of Representatives on Friday passed President Joe Biden’s $1.85 trillion Build Back Better Act, sending the measure to the Senate, where major hurdles could significantly change, or even halt, the legislation.

The vote came much later than intended.

Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, the top House Republican, stopped Democrats from passing the bill as they intended on Thursday when he commandeered the floor with a speech lasting more than eight hours in which he denounced the spending legislation along with the entire Democratic agenda.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and other top House Democrats spoke to reporters after voting to pass President Biden's sweeping spending bill.

"Today, we had the honor of participating in passing legislation for the people to build back better. As I always say, with women, for the children," Pelosi said.

She lauded Biden, saying that while the infrastructure bill was "was very, very important," it "was not the sum total of his vision."

Pelosi said she is most excited about family medical leave in this legislation.

The US House of Representatives has passed US President Joe Biden's $1.9tn (£1.4tn) Build Back Better Act after facing fierce opposition from Republicans.

The sweeping social spending and climate package is considered a key pillar of Mr Biden's agenda.

The vote came after a record-long speech from House minority leader Kevin McCarthy to delay the vote.

The legislation now faces significant hurdles as it heads to the US Senate.

U.S. employers are still struggling to find workers six weeks after enhanced federal jobless benefits expired, but that doesn’t mean Republicans are letting President Biden off the hook.

The National Federation of Independent Business reported last week that a record 51% of small-business owners had openings in September that they could not fill, a 48-year high, even though the boost in unemployment benefits ended on Labor Day. The shortage indicates that other factors are at play.

A total of 49 House and Senate Republicans helped Democrats pass billions in American taxpayer money on welfare, driver’s licenses, housing costs, and more for Afghans brought to the United States as part of President Joe Biden’s massive resettlement operation.

On Thursday, 34 House Republicans and 15 Senate Republicans voted with Democrats to approve $6.4 billion in taxpayer money for the roughly 95,000 Afghans that Biden hopes to bring to the U.S. over the next 12 months — a population nine times larger than Jackson, Wyoming’s resident population.

More than half of the nation’s non-citizen population — including legal immigrants, foreign visa workers, and illegal aliens — use American taxpayer-funded welfare after arriving in the United States, a new analysis reveals.

Research by Center for Immigration Studies Director of Research Steven Camarota finds that about 55 percent of non-citizen households in the U.S. use at least one form of welfare compared to just 32 percent of households headed by native-born Americans.

Two years after a ProPublica investigation, the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services still is not complying with a federal court order to better serve Spanish-speaking families.

Early last year, the Cook County public guardian grew worried that Illinois’ child welfare agency once again was failing the Spanish-speaking families whose children were in its care.