Report: Many states have cut unemployment benefits

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State lawmakers enacted a range of policies in 2011 to amend their unemployment insurance (UI) programs, most of them motivated by insolvent state trust funds. Most notably, six states passed unprecedented cuts in the duration of benefits, for the first time reducing benefit weeks to less than the decades-long accepted standard of 26 weeks. In addition, states altered benefit formulas to reduce average check amounts and tightened UI eligibility requirements. In a number of states, legislators exploited the need to enact a technical fix to authorize temporary federal extensions, using it as an opportunity to extract permanent state UI program cuts. Much of the legislative debate this year was marked by open attacks on the character of workers who rely on unemployment insurance during this prolonged economic downturn.