January 22, 2021: President Joe Biden will take another step to fight against COVID-19 on Friday by providing economic relief to Americans still reeling from the effects of the dangerous pandemic.

Two executive orders signed by Biden will give low-income families easy access to federal nutrition and food assistance programs and start the process of requiring federal contractors to pay their workers.

The program has allowed benefit amounts of nearly $5.70 per child per school day. Increasing the service by 15% would more accurately reflect the cost of missing meals and making it easy to claim the benefits.

According to the administration, the revision would provide a family with three children more than $100 of extra support every two months.

Biden’s order also boosts the emergency allotments provided to low-income families under the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program

 (SNAP). 

 40% of eligible families already receiving maximum SNAP benefits were deemed ineligible for the emergency allotment under Trump.

 Under Biden, the families would be eligible for an emergency SNAP allotment equal to their maximum benefit. A family of four could boost their snap benefits by 15% to 20% per month.

More than 40 million Americans receive SNAP benefits to help them put food on the table, but according to critics, the services fall short of what it costs many households to provide a healthy diet.

Biden will direct his administration to start the work that would allow him to issue an order in his first 100 days requiring federal contractors to pay their workers a $15 million minimum wage and give them emergency paid leave.

Agencies will be given the work to review which federal employees earn less than $15 an hour and develop recommendations to boost their pay.

His order will revoke three executive orders signed by Trump that, among other things, limited federal workers’ time for collective bargaining and restricted union representatives’ access to office space and materials.

Biden already has signed more than two dozen executive orders spanning various subjects since he took office on Wednesday.