photo by: Screenshot/Kansas Department of Labor

The Kansas Department of Labor's unemployment benefits website is pictured Dec. 29, 2020.

Unemployed Kansans will receive new and extended coronavirus pandemic relief payments until March after a $900 billion federal stimulus package was signed into law over the weekend.

However, it’s unclear when the new payments will begin, and a Kansas Department of Labor spokesman did not commit to saying state residents would not experience a lapse in the extended unemployment aid this week.

On Sunday, President Donald Trump signed the COVID-19 economic relief package into law, providing an extension to unemployment programs that were set to expire last week. The legislation also included a new $300 supplemental weekly unemployment payment.

According to the KDOL, the new stimulus package will extend the unemployment benefits for another 11 weeks, beginning this week and ending on March 13. However, there have been concerns throughout the country that Trump’s nearly weeklong delay to sign the bill caused a lapse in payments to those receiving the federal aid, according to the Associated Press.

“The date was really unfortunate,” Michele Evermore, a senior policy analyst at the National Employment Law Project, a workers’ advocacy group, told AP. “Now there’s some question as to when this gets paid out.”

Congress approved the aid package on Dec. 21, but Trump threatened to veto the bill. He had said that the package should include more direct aid to citizens, calling for the bill to increase the aid from $600 per person to $2,000.

But no changes were made and Trump eventually signed the bill into law on Sunday, according to media reports.

Additionally, when KDOL last week announced the unemployment programs that were set for extension, the department said that it would not be able to provide the new benefits to Kansans until it received guidance from the federal government, which could take up to two weeks.

When asked whether unemployed Kansans would experience a lapse in payments, KDOL spokesman Jerry Grasso declined to comment and pointed to the department’s earlier announcement.

“When we have more information to share, we will do so,” Grasso said in an email.

Evermore said it’s possible the U.S. Department of Labor will interpret the law to resume aid this week, but if the bill had been signed a day earlier, there would have been no doubt. Instead, there is now uncertainty during a time of severe difficulty for those without work.

“These are people who have been living in poverty for months,” Evermore said. “Any delay is an immense hardship.”

Between Kansas’ standard unemployment program and the additional federal aid, the state has provided more than 3.4 million weekly claims totaling over $2.4 billion since March 2020, according to KDOL.

— The Associated Press contributed to this report.