Florida’s Re-employment Assistance Program — let’s call it what it is, the unemployment fund — has been frustrating, put mildly, for those nearly 700,000 state residents who have lost jobs or hours or who have been furloughed and have applied for benefits. Or at least tried their hardest to.

If you are one of them, the best advice is to just keep plugging away.

Facing weeks of problems with program’s online system, Gov. Ron DeSantis made changes this week, removing Department of Economic Opportunity Executive Director Ken Lawson from oversight. That role now goes to Department of Management Services Secretary Jonathan Satter, who was put in charge Wednesday.

“Every morning I want to know how many claims have been paid, and I can’t get those numbers. That’s not acceptable,” Gov. Ron DeSantis said. “While we’ve made some progress in the recent days, it’s not nearly enough. We have an inordinate amount of claims we need to work through.”

“The governor has given us authority to rally all state resources. We’ve had thousands of state employees assisting in the effort,” Satter said, noting many are working 20-hour days to get these systems fully operational. “I’ve never seen the personal commitment as I have of state agency workers over the last 72 hours. The governor allowed us to cut through red tape.”

DeSantis said Thursday that payments went to 33,000 people who have made claims since March, that’s of the 648,000 Floridians who have made claims in the last three weeks. That’s about 5 percent. It is a high-stakes game, as the $600 per week federal benefit from the CARES Act is tied to applying for the $275 per week benefit from the state — most of those who would not qualify for the state benefit will qualify for the federal benefit.

And with 43,000 new Disney employees who the company announced will be joining the system, and DeSantis talked about automatically enrolling them, further burdening the system.

Work has gone into the state’s online portal — www.floridajobs.org — and the DEO has eliminated the requirement for people to report “actively seeking work” every two weeks to receive Reemployment Assistance benefits.

Over four weeks, roughly 22 million Americans have made unemployment claims – that’s about the population of the state of Florida.