The DTV Delay Act, signed into law on February 11, 2009, extended the digital transition deadline to June 12, 2009. The DTV Delay Act did not address the shortfall in funding for converter-box coupons; the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, part of a larger appropriations bill signed into law on February 17, 2009, added $650 million in funding—$490 million of that for coupons, increasing the total coupon-fund expenditure to $1.83 billion. By February 18, 36 percent of the United States's full-power stations had transitioned to digital-only, but five million of the nation's 115 million households remained entirely unready; at the time, 4.3 million coupon requests remained on the NTIA waiting list. The NTIA resumed issuing coupons in early March 2009, expecting to clear its backlog in two and a half weeks. Political issues had contributed to the delays in sending out coupons; the NTIA could not issue coupons above the spending limit set in the bill, even knowing that many already-issued coupons would expire. Even though unused coupons meant more money for the program, the coupons had to actually expire before the money could be "reused" for newly issued coupons. Those coupons it did send out were sent via standard mail, rather than first-class mail, as Congress had required in the legislation, but that caused coupons to be delayed up to four weeks.