From the moment President Barack Obama was inaugurated until he signed the $787 billion stimulus bill on February 17, all the activity surrounding the package focused on him and Congress.

Now the spotlight shifts to governors, local officials, federal regulators and even HR professionals. These people will influence how the massive package is utilized.

I’ll get to the part about HR in a moment. But first, governors will determine whether and how the unemployment benefits tucked into the stimulus behemoth will become a reality. My colleague Ed Frauenheim outlined the changes in an online feature story.

Some governors, however, are wary of signing up for the $7 billion in incentives that the package provides to enhance coverage for low-wage workers and extend it to part-time workers.

They worry that long after the stimulus funding has evaporated, they will be responsible for a much larger unemployment system that could require higher taxes on businesses to maintain.

Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels is one of the skeptical state executives. He has already raised unemployment payments by $25 each week, a provision of stimulus that is fully federally funded. But he says that the so-called modernization initiative could have a deleterious effect on Indiana.

In an interview with Indiana reporters while he was in Washington on February 23 for a meeting of the National Governors Association, Daniels said that his state’s unemployment program already is paying out more than it takes in. The “leakage” would be exacerbated if it was extended to part-time workers and incorporated other changes under the stimulus incentive.

“If you take this short-term bait, you commit yourself to this larger expenditure,” Daniels said. “That wouldn’t be a good bargain for us. Indiana’s already got some of the most generous benefits in the country.”

Unemployment reform is just one of several major changes contained in the stimulus bill that did not get through Congress on their own over the course of many years. Another is a $1.6 billion, two-year reauthorization of Trade Adjustment Assistance.

The TAA program provides training and health care benefits for workers who have lost their jobs due to global competition. Under the changes in the stimulus bill, it now covers employees in the service sector. Previously, help was limited to those in manufacturing.

TAA now applies to workers affected by offshoring to all countries—including China and India—not just those with whom the U.S. has trade agreements. Other provisions increase training funds available to states by $575 million per year for the next two years and also create TAA programs for entire communities.

These changes would be helpful to workers. But the regulations needed to implement them could take six months to a year, according Howard Rosen, executive director of the Trade Adjustment Assistance Coalition.

The Department of Labor has to determine how to identify a service industry—and service employees, for that matter. For instance, TAA could include computer programmers for the first time.

“This is very technical stuff,” Rosen said.

But a bigger challenge is introducing TAA to HR professionals, according to Rosen. Many companies don’t know the program exists, let alone understand that it has been expanded.

“There’s going to have to be an incredible outreach effort,” Rosen said.

That job is complicated by the fact that most HR people aren’t familiar with how unemployment insurance works.

“I’m astounded by their basic lack of knowledge of the unemployment system that has existed for 75 years,” Rosen said.

Now TAA can better augment standard severance payments. “This is aggressive employment services, which many companies don’t provide,” Rosen said.