Oregon hopes to begin paying a new, $300 weekly unemployment bonus sometime in the next few weeks, providing a financial boost to hundreds of thousands of Oregonians who had their benefits slashed by at least half at the end of July.

The state declared earlier this week that it would seek the new funds, authorized in an executive order by President Donald Trump. The money replaces, at a substantially lower level, a $600 weekly unemployment bonus Congress authorized in March.

That bonus expired last month, and Congress is deadlocked over a possible extension.

Implementing the new, $300 payments will require reprogramming the state’s obsolete system for paying unemployment benefits. David Gerstenfeld, interim head of the Oregon Employment Department, said in a media call Wednesday that he’s not sure how long the updates will take but hopes to have the benefits in people’s hands within a few weeks.

The added benefits will be retroactive to the end of July and will likely cover three to five weeks of bonuses, according to Gerstenfeld. He said that’s all the money the federal emergency program has to pay benefits, and cautioned the benefits could run out sooner if wildfires or hurricanes exhaust the funding sooner.

The president gave states the option of kicking in an additional $100 a week to supplement the $300 weekly bonus, and last week Gerstenfeld said he believed Oregon could tap its relatively well capitalized unemployment insurance trust fund to make those additional payments.

But the employment department said this week that subsequent federal guidance ruled that out, meaning Oregon would have to draw from its general fund to make the payments. The department opted not to seek the money from the Legislature, given that Oregon — like nearly every state — already faces a pandemic-induced budget crisis.

At least three states — Arizona, Texas and Louisiana — have already begun paying the $300 bonus. Thirty-five others plan to make the payments but expect varying degrees of delays while they update their own systems. Just one state so far, Montana, said it will pay the additional $100.

Oregon has paid more than $4 billion in jobless benefits since the pandemic began but has struggled to keep up with the unprecedented claims volume.

On his weekly media call Wednesday, Gerstenfeld said the department knows “tens of thousands” of Oregonians are still waiting for their first benefits — but he said the department hasn’t been able to come up with a more precise estimate of how many it owes.

However, Gerstenfeld said the chances have improved that the department will be able to pay hundreds of millions of dollars in delayed federal benefits for jobless Oregonians before those benefits expire on Dec. 31.

Congress voted in March to waive the customary one-week waiting period before laid-off workers are eligible for payments. But Oregon — perhaps alone among all states — has been unable to implement the waiver because its antique computers cannot accommodate the change.

That has postponed indefinitely benefits worth at least $800 apiece for hundreds of thousands of Oregonians.

The employment department estimated earlier that it would take at least 4,000 hours of computer programming to implement the waiver, and cautioned it might not be able to meet the end-of-year federal deadline — putting all that money at risk.

New estimates, though, put the total workload at “significantly less than 4,000 hours,” Gerstenfeld said on his weekly media call Wednesday.

“We’re more confident now than we were that we’ll be able to get it done by the end of the year,” Gerstenfeld said, “but that’s still not a certainty.”