Making sense of the already exhausted $2.1 billion state Excluded

As the state’s Excluded Workers Fund stops accepting new applications for assistance with more than 200,000 claims still pending — the vast majority of which will get zippo given the imminent exhaustion of the $2.1 billion, by far the most generous such program in the country — New York should consider an additional cash injection to help the many, many immigrants who will be left out in the cold.

But let’s be clear: If Albany had simply disbursed the pot more intelligently and equitably by gauging demand before doling out the cash, this wouldn’t be happening.

Instead, officials set up just two tiers of grants, with 99.74% of applicants qualifying for the full $15,600. And because it was first-come, first-served, the kitty ran dry long before it managed to reach anywhere near the nearly 300,000 people it was designed to help. As things stand, fewer than 140,000 will see a single dollar, a direct consequence of officials’ lack of foresight.

Protip: If a grant program is specifically designed to help workers excluded from other government programs, disburse cash in a fashion that doesn’t effectively exclude half of them.

But the poor design is not undocumented New Yorkers’ fault. If it is not too heavy a political lift given many competing priorities — and at this point, it may well be — lawmakers should allocate additional funds to provide at least some relief to the hundreds of thousands of workers, including those in upstate communities who were slower to be made aware of the program, didn’t have access to the same support ecosystem as their downstate counterparts and now risk ending up with nothing. That’s what happened with the federal PPP program for small businesses, the first round of which passed many worthy recipients by.

But before making any new such allocation, policymakers should study this failure and structure a program with more built-in flexibility that can provide less generous disbursements in the wake of overwhelming demand. Albany, learning from mistakes: Imagine that.