Last Friday, President Donald Trump signed an expansion of the federal Public Safety Officers’ Benefits Program to include disability or death from COVID-19 among the criteria for payments.
The Public Safety Officers’ Benefits Program (PSOB) provides a death benefit to the eligible survivors of Federal, state or local public safety officers whose death was the direct and proximate result of a personal (traumatic) injury sustained in the line of duty (certain fatal, line of duty heart attacks and strokes are also covered).
The act also provides a disability benefit to eligible public safety officers who have been permanently and totally disabled as the direct result of a catastrophic personal injury sustained in the line of duty. The injury must permanently prevent the officer from performing any gainful work.
The amount of the PSOB benefit is $359,316.00 for eligible deaths and disabilities occurring on or after October 1, 2018. The amount of the PSOB educational assistance benefit for one month of full-time attendance on or after October 1, 2018 is $1,224.00.
The Safeguarding America’s First Responders Act of 2020 is similar to the HEROES Act, which secured benefits for the families of those who gave their lives during the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
The new Act extends the Public Safety Officers Benefits Program by creating a presumption that if a first responder is diagnosed with the coronavirus within 45 days of their last day on the job, the Department of Justice will treat it as a line of duty incident and provide the payments.
The Act provides that “..unless competent medical evidence establishes that the death of a public safety officer (as defined in section 1204 of title I of the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968 (34 U.S.C. 10284)) was directly and proximately caused by something other than COVID-19, COVID-19 (or complications therefrom) suffered by the public safety officer shall be presumed to constitute a personal injury within the meaning of section 1201(a) of title I of the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968 (34 U.S.C. 10281(a)), sustained in the line of duty by the officer..“
Before, the illness had to be officially linked to a job-related source. That burden of proof required painstaking contact tracing efforts.
U.S. Sen. Chuck Grassley, an Iowa Republican who introduced the measure in the U.S. Senate, said the law was needed to keep the survivors of first responders who die from COVID-19 from having to prove their loved one contracted it on the job.