Are unemployment benefits keeping people from working? We will soon have an answer.

Republican-led states are betting that the federal supplements are the reason. By Monday, five red states — Alabama, Arkansas, Mississippi, Montana and South Carolina — had announced that they were pulling out of the federal program. That number has grown to at least 16, including the large states of Georgia, Ohio and Arizona. The details differ in each state, but unemployed workers in all of them will stop receiving their extra $300 a week no later than mid-July.