Sorry, no flashy memes, and this takes some paragraphs to explain. It's kind of a big deal flying under the radar. TL:DR at the bottom.

The initial 2020 CARES Act stimulus bill of $2.2 trillion under Trump had a deadline that all the billions of dollars sent to local and state governments for pandemic related expenses, if not used, had to be returned to the federal government by December 1st 2020. The reason that the payouts to individual citizens was only $1,200 was because the rest of the money went to state and local governments to pay for their response efforts, and they in turn dished it out to nonprofits, etc. etc.

In late November 2020, an extension was given until December 1st, 2021 for the return of the funds. Now, if the initial CARES Act funds are not spent by Dec 1, 2021, as per the law, they are supposed to be returned to the feds as per the law.

I have just learned, as I work in public sector finance, that the feds are now allowing funds to be "de-federalized" in order to prevent them from returning completely! It's basically legal money laundering.

How this works - say you are in city X, and you got $1,000,000 in revenue to pay for pandemic related expenses, but you only had $500,000 of allowable expenses. (The 2020 CARES Act was very specific as to what was an allowable pandemic related expense. Rent support for the unemployed was allowable, community gardens were not. You get the idea.) Prior January 2021, you had to return $500,000 of that $1,000,000. Now the feds are saying you can overbudget allowable expenses and keep the change, as it were, as if you are a patron at a restaurant leaving a big tip.

Since you budgeted for an allowable expense, but didn't use all of it, this change in policy allows you to keep the remaining revenue. That $500,000 now drops into your budget and is treated the same as other tax dollars, and you can keep it as fund balance.

This means that state and local governments, given an additional year, will find all sorts of creative ways to spend their full 2020 CARES Act allotment, and thus not return it to the feds.

This change means there will also be no politically tricky questions about why there was a 2nd, and then 3rd stimulus when states and municipalities are returning large amounts of money from the first stimulus.

TL:DR - The Feds changed the policy on the first stimulus to allows states municipalities to keep the money in contrivance of the law, through creative accounting, to make it appear that there is a need for a 3rd or 4th stimulus.