Sixty-one-year-old Saleem Taalib-Din filed an application for unemployment assistance on Sept. 30, the day after he was fired from his construction job working on the Arlington Memorial Bridge.

Week after week, he called D.C.’s Department of Employment Services to check on the status of his application, but each time the line just kept ringing. “I sit there so long with the music I fall asleep,” he says, estimating that he’s called the office at least 30 times. When he finally heard back from a DOES employee, in early December, it was to notify him that he would hear from the office within 21 days.

Taalib-Din hasn’t been able to find a source of income since he lost his job, and he’s running out of options. He says he’s been skipping meals as his groceries run low, and he’s worried his car will be repossessed because he can’t make payments. He rents a room on East Capitol Street, and says his landlord has been pressuring him about paying rent.

“Last night I didn’t eat at all,” he says. “I’m down to the last bowl because I’m trying to save what little food I got. Some days I’ll try to fast, some days I’ll eat a little — it’s just getting rough. I don’t know what to do.” (After publication of this story, a DOES employee confirmed with DCist/WAMU that the agency released Taalib-Din’s payments on Dec. 21, and that his claim is up to date.)

Unemployment offices weren’t built to handle the volume of claims that surged this year: More than 162,000 people have filed for unemployment assistance in D.C. since March, compared to the roughly 25,000 people who applied in all of 2019. About 1.4 million have filed in Maryland, and by mid-June more than 800,000 people had in Virginia. While D.C.’s unemployment office aims to disburse payments for eligible applicants 21 days after filing, it takes longer to resolve claims with issues, like inaccuracies in the application, even in a good year. Thousands of people have been left to wait weeks or months to receive their benefits, if they receive them at all. 

In interviews with WAMU/DCist, people who filed for unemployment benefits in D.C. and Maryland say unemployment offices’ failures to efficiently process their claims have significantly altered their quality of life. They have been forced to skip meals, borrow money from friends and family, enter mortgage forbearances and, in at least one case, lose their home. 

“The health and economic survival of residents, businesses and workers in the District remains a priority for the Bowser Administration and we continue to deliver responsive services and assistance, as soon as possible, to those in need,” a spokesperson for DOES wrote in an emailed statement to DCist/WAMU. 

Taurus Bailey filed for unemployment benefits after his temporary job as a program analyst with the U.S. Census Bureau in Suitland, Maryland came to an end in September. He had another job lined up, but when the start date got pushed back by a month due to a paperwork mix-up, he faced the prospect of weeks with no income.

Bailey, who lives in Centreville, Virginia, promptly filed for unemployment in Maryland, since workers file in the state where they worked, not where they live. But Bailey never received his benefits. He tried to reach the state’s unemployment office by phone for weeks, but had no luck.

When he did finally get through to someone, he says a representative in the call center told him to file a Pandemic Unemployment Assistance claim. PUA benefits are geared toward self-employed, part-time, or other workers generally ineligible for traditional benefits. That representative told Bailey a different department would have to help him change his claim, but Bailey says the representative then told him they weren’t able to transfer him to the appropriate office, and advised him to wait for someone to reach out. A spokesperson for the Maryland Department of Labor did not respond to WAMU/DCist’s request for comment by publishing time.

Bailey eventually reached out to lawmakers in Maryland and Virginia for help; Virginia Congressman Gerry Connolly’s office is looking into his case, Bailey says. 

“Even though I only needed four or five weeks of claim benefits, it was still detrimental,” the 43-year-old says. During the month he was unemployed, he says knowing he was starting a new job soon helped, but that he still had to streamline his expenses, and put off paying some altogether, telling his roommate he’d be late on rent.

He also got by in part thanks to friends and family who loaned him money via Cash App. He started paying them back when he began his new job with the U.S. Department of Education.

Bailey says he “understands that the country is going through a pandemic and there’s gonna be a lot of disparity and stuff, it’s just, you being a part of it, it’s really a very uncomfortable butterfly in your stomach the entire time trying to figure out how you’re gonna survive.”

Some locals who have received benefits have been unable to get the full amount they say they’re owed.

Robbie Cimmino had been working as a bartender at Jack Rose Dining Saloon when COVID-19 hit the District in March. He soon applied for traditional UI benefits, but was denied. Because he had recently moved to D.C. and had only worked at Jack Rose for about six weeks, he says he wasn’t eligible for them.

After the CARES Act passed in the spring, the 32-year-old learned he was eligible for PUA benefits and soon began receiving money, including the additional $600 a week allocated by Congress. A DOES employee also later told him he could also receive back pay for the initial 4 or 5 weeks he’d been out of work.

As of December, though, he still hasn’t received the back pay. He has checked in with DOES regularly, and was told this summer that the benefits would be applied automatically once the office made its way through a huge influx of other cases.

Cimmino says the DOES employees he’s spoken with since have been unable to give him any clarity on when might receive the money. He likens the bureaucratic opacity of the process to “filing paperwork into a hole.”

Since the additional $600 ran out at the end of July, Cimmino has been making $179 a week.

Cimmino finished law school in 2019 and passed the bar exam in February, but says his search for legal work — and other kinds of jobs — has so far been fruitless. Previously living in Columbia Heights, he’s currently staying with a friend in Arlington who has been covering the cost of basics like food and toiletries. Cimmino says he contributes as he’s able.

“I’m kind of in a very serious holding pattern and living on the generosity of others, effectively, at this point,” he says. To his knowledge, Cimmino stands to receive about $3,000 in back pay when it finally comes through.

While he feels he has more support than some other people do, Cimmino says the funds would be “a big exhale” for him. “Every little check that comes through is like, ‘Oh, now I can go and buy dinner for a few days,’” he says. “Or I can go and buy stuff. Like, I can sort of normally support myself like an adult, but until then it’s just kind of trying to not feel the embarrassment of having someone have to buy me, like, potatoes.”

The process of filing for unemployment has also been difficult for business owners, who have to juggle both meeting their own needs and keeping their companies afloat. In March, 34-year-old D.C. resident Amanda Moore, who owns her own small business providing trade show hosts, began to hemorrhage clients. 

As COVID-19 closures shut down indoor events around the country, Moore lost $17,000 in work by early March. She has since lost at least $500,000 in contracts, and adds that that’s the low end of the estimate —at a certain point, she just stopped counting. 

She applied for D.C.’s small business microgrant program, which provided those in financial need with no-strings-attached funding. But Moore received only $1,000, nearly one-third of which went right back to the city when she had to pay $300 in fees to file her biennial report and keep her business registration active. 

While she received her initial unemployment benefits relatively quickly, in April, Moore says that payout was based on a one-time $4,000 part-time job she had in 2018; her UI payout came to only $105 a week. When that ran its 26-week course and she applied for the 13-week extension under Pandemic Emergency Unemployment Compensation, it took nearly 10 weeks — from Sept. 26 to Dec. 4 — to receive benefits. 

“There would be periods where I would be very narrowly focused on [calling DOES]. And there would be a week where I’d stare at a wall and hope I died, and I wouldn’t really do much,” Moore says. “It happens in waves.” 

In the interim, unable to pay rent and, as Moore says, unwilling “to accrue tens of thousands of dollars of debt that I’ll never be able to pay back to pay someone else’s mortgage,” she had to move out of the English basement she was living in. 

What Moore and others emphasized to DCist/WAMU was that they did everything they thought they were supposed to — filled out every document, followed up with their respective unemployment offices, and actively tried to resolve any outstanding issues. But that wasn’t enough.

“This is completely normal and exactly how the system is supposed to work,” Moore says of her experience. “Nothing is wrong with my situation. There’s probably nothing that can be fixed. This is what it’s meant to be.”