For now, unemployed workers are left waiting for checks as the states struggle to handle a volume of unemployment applications unprecedented since the U.S. started tracking jobless claims in 1967.

“Can we get federal help for that? The answer is no,” Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker said this week, discussing the mass of calls flooding the state’s Department of Employment Security. “We can’t get federal help. We’re barely getting federal help for everything else we need for personnel, and right now, it’s all focused on the medical staffing and health care professionals.”

A DOL spokesperson said in a statement the department is “supporting our state partners as they deliver traditional unemployment and expanded benefits available,” and “has quickly released new rules and guidance for states, businesses, and individual Americans to help those in need of relief.”

States have tried so far to make do with the resources and guidance they have. Illinois and Maryland have extended hours, reassigned workers and hired new employees to help answer the phones. Connecticut and New Jersey are scrambling to find the few remaining computer programmers who are familiar with a 60-year old coding language. California has waived typical waiting periods and is allowing state officials to “exercise flexibility” by awarding benefits in some cases before making a final determination of a person’s eligibility.

Issues with processing unemployment claims and doling out benefit checks are just the latest evidence that the trillions of dollars Congress spent to help workers and businesses have yet to reach many of those who need it the most. Bankers have been pleading directly with Trump to fix problems with a Small Business Administration system holding them back from issuing $350 billion in government-backed loans designed to avert major layoffs. Other banks and financial firms are highlighting more work that needs to be done to quickly get $1,200 stimulus checks to Americans and warn that sending paper checks through the mail could become a major source of fraud.

The $1 billion allocated under the Families First Coronavirus Response Act, which took effect on Friday, was meant to help states modernize their filing systems and handle the onslaught of claims. But the money still trickling out to states amounts in many areas to too little, too late for systems that have been neglected for years and can’t be overhauled overnight.

“Three weeks ago, a billion dollars seemed like a lot,” said Michele Evermore, a senior policy analyst with the National Employment Law Project. “But this is a spike in claims processing like we’ve never seen before.”

The frantic calls for volunteers trained in a decades-old computer programming language called COBOL is perhaps the starkest example of how neglected state unemployment systems have been. Rob Asaro-Angelo, the New Jersey Commissioner of Labor and Workforce Development, told reporters over the weekend that IT workers are working “nonstop” to make the state’s 40-year-old systems continue to perform under such “atypical circumstances.”

New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy put a call out for volunteers who are trained in the antiquated program, and said it’s something the state will review in the aftermath of the pandemic. In New Jersey, just over 362,000 residents filed for unemployment in the past two weeks. Benefits surged by about 1,600 percent during the first week of the outbreak.
“We have systems that are 40 years-plus old, and there’ll be lots of postmortems. And one of them on our list will be, how did we get here where we literally needed COBOL programmers?” Murphy said over the weekend.

Even so, Murphy said that New Jersey is in a “better position than most” states, and the state’s Department of Labor has taken several actions to improve processing, like adding phone lines and training additional staffers to field calls from the constantly jammed phone lines. But the governor also said on Wednesday that the state would welcome any additional money to improve its infrastructure.

“We’ve got an overwhelming demand, we’ve got legacy systems,” Murphy said. “We can use anything we can get.”

In Wisconsin, officials handling unemployment insurance benefits said they’re eligible to receive $9 million under one of the federal bailout bills. They said they’ll use it mostly to hire new employees and beef up staffing to administer unemployment programs. Wisconsin received nearly 310,000 claims in the two weeks ending April 4, up from roughly 78,400 over the same period last year.

That sum “isn’t even going to begin to address our issue of modernizing our system,” said Mark Reihl, the unemployment insurance division administrator at Wisconsin’s Department of Workforce Development. He estimated that overhauling Wisconsin’s system, which also uses COBOL, would cost somewhere between $40 million and $60 million.

Around the country, untold numbers of workers still find themselves battling jammed phone lines, crashed websites and even long lines that threaten exposure to the coronavirus.

Ryan Yeates, 26, a Navy veteran, said he has called the New York state unemployment line repeatedly for the past week but has yet to reach a live person. Yeates said he tried to apply online but was turned away because he is a first-time applicant.

“They give you a busy message saying all the claims specialists are taken right now, call back at a later time, and then they hang up on you,” Yeates said. “That only happens about two percent of the time. About ninety percent of the time the call doesn’t even go through and it just says ‘busy.’”

On Wednesday, Yeates tweeted a screenshot of his smartphone’s call log. He had called 200 times in six days.

“It’s like our ongoing joke at this point, how many times we call that day,” said Yeates.

In Florida, hundreds of people lined up outside a library, violating social distancing guidelines to get paper applications after the state’s website and phone lines became overloaded. Gov. Ron DeSantis said this week he added 72 servers, reassigned 2,000 state employees and would hire 750 more to help process claims.

States also complain that the Trump administration was slow to give guidance on how to distribute unemployment benefits to self-employed people and gig workers. The Labor Department finally published a fact sheet on Sunday, nearly two weeks after Trump signed the provision into law.

“There’s been a lot of frustrated people trying to sign up for that,” said Mike Ricci, the communications director for Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan, a Republican.

Like many states, Maryland is still struggling to upgrade its infrastructure — specifically to allow federal workers, many of whom commute to Washington, apply online. Maryland has been fielding 1,000 calls every two hours, Ricci said, with some applicants never able to get through. Officials are training more state employees to process claims, but that can’t be done remotely.

“We’re trying to keep narrowing the list of the people who need to call in,” Ricci said.

Reihl, the Wisconsin administrator, added that simply having the Department of Labor answer questions faster would help the state move more quickly through processing its claims. “The guidance documents are out, but they are far from complete in answering all the questions,” he said. “We really would like to have our questions answered sooner.”

The Department of Labor’s rollout of new benefits and programs without a comprehensive explanation detailing who is eligible also sparked confusion that further deluged states, some officials said. In Colorado, labor officials said a significant proportion of the 200,000 daily calls they fielded last week were from people asking about stimulus checks and other issues that needed to be directed elsewhere.

“So, information before we announce programs would be really helpful,” said Joe Barela, executive director of Colorado’s Department of Labor and Employment. “It really, I think, set us back as we tried to filter people to the right entities, agencies at the state level.”

Lawmakers are demanding answers this week from the Department of Labor. Thirty-seven Senate Democrats wrote to Labor Secretary Eugene Scalia Tuesday asking his agency to “do everything in its power to support states” — including offering technological support, expanding the capacity of online systems and providing as much operational flexibility as possible.

“The Trump administration needs to do more to help states get money out the door,” Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon, the top Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee, said in a statement emailed to POLITICO.

“For workers who have been hit by an economic wrecking ball and are struggling to put food on the table, every day without benefits matters,” he said. “We’re going to keep pressing the administration to do all it can.”

Shia Kapos and Katy Murphy contributed to this report.