Thread by @NBCNews

The eviction moratorium is about to end, yet federal relief funds largely remain unspent. nbcnews.to/3j8AtmM

By @BraceyHarris and @adielkaplan #NBCNewsThreads (1/10)

“[I] pray to God when I get home my stuff’s not sitting outside," Demia Burse says.

Burse, a mom of 3 in Mississippi, fell behind on rent after she left her job as a certified nursing assistant to help her children with virtual school. (2/10)

She started asking her local county for help paying 2 to 3 months of back rent.

But she questions whether any of the $25 billion Congress approved in December for emergency rental assistance will reach her landlord in time. (3/10)

As of July 13, the Mississippi Home Corporation, which oversees paying out the funds, had distributed $10 million of the $186 million dollars of their federally funded program — or just about 6% of the money. (4/10)

The sparse spending isn't isolated to Mississippi. Only a fraction of the country's funds are expected to be distributed before the eviction moratorium expires after July 31. (5/10)

.@NBCNews analysis of responses from 41 of 50 states found that 26 of them had distributed less than 10% of their first allocations, although several programs had just begun distributing money in June. (6/10)

Mississippi started sending money to landlords in May. Although the state's spending has ramped up from distributing less than $133,700 in the first month of its program to $10 million by mid-July, it has a backlog of nearly 1,000 applications. (7/10)

The reasons the aid hasn't reached landlords and tenants are complex, from the stumbles that come with setting up new programs to software woes to varying degrees of hesitancy among states to sign off on payments without extensive documentation of need. (8/10)

Advocates say some state and local programs are shunning flexibility encouraged by the Treasury Dept. and sticking to rigid paperwork requirements, instead of allowing tenants to attest to certain circumstances. (9/10)

The result is an approval process that can drag out for weeks or more as tenants scramble to submit the correct documentation while federal eviction protections rapidly fray. (10/10)