Biden Taps California Official Who Oversaw Billions In COVID Unemployment Fraud To Serve As Labor Secretary

Ben ZeisloftFebruary 28, 2023

President Joe Biden He announced Tuesday that he will nominate Julie Su. Julie Su is the person who managed billions of dollars. Pandemic relief Fraud while she was a senior officer in CaliforniaTo replace Labor Secretary Marty Walsh.

Su has been serving as the deputy secretary of labor for Walsh since July 2021. Prior to that, she was secretary of California Labor and Workforce Development Agency. “It is my honor to nominate Julie Su to be our country’s next Secretary of Labor,” Biden stated in a Statement. “Over several decades, Julie has led the largest state labor department in the nation, cracked down on wage theft, fought to protect trafficked workers, increased the minimum wage, created good-paying, high-quality jobs, and established and enforced workplace safety standards.”

Walsh leaves the Labor Department to head the National Hockey League Players’ Association (the labor union that represents NHL athletes). His tenure was Marked Rail unions threatened to strike a nationwide strike in advance of the midterm elections. The Biden administration was forced to negotiate an agreement that gave workers 24% raises and better health benefits.

If confirmed by the Senate, Su would become the first Asian American member in the Biden Cabinet. She was previously Received The indirect oversight of the California Employment Development Department has been criticized. Fraudulent activity was responsible for one-tenth the $114 billion in pandemic relief claims that the agency handled. Additional 17% of benefit payments were made into accounts that were frozen to investigate fraud; the total fraud amount could have exceeded $31 billion according to a January 20,21 report. Report The San Francisco Chronicle.

“There is no sugarcoating the reality,” Su spoke to reporters following the revelations, according a Report From the Los Angeles Times. “California has not had sufficient security measures in place to prevent this level of fraud, and criminals took advantage of the situation.”

Su nonetheless blamed Trump for not providing adequate guidance about how to distribute the resources and counter fraudulent claims. “It should be no surprise that EDD was overwhelmed, just like the rest of the nation’s unemployment agencies,” She went on. “And we now know that as millions of Californians applied for help, international and national criminal rings were at work behind the scenes working relentlessly to steal unemployment benefits using sophisticated methods of identity theft.”

Fraudsters could be real Theft According to a report, as high as $60 billion could be made from federal unemployment programs created by lockdown-era stimul bills. Report The Government Accountability Office. Other Estimates It is predicted that 400 billion dollars, or half the amount of unemployment funds approved by Congress, will be lost to fraud.

Su’s appointment would take place as lawmakers try to get answers about the stimulus funds. Multiple reports were issued by House Republicans on Ways and Means Committee Requests For hearings on fraud in the last two years, Democrats have consistently Blocked The legislators say that the requests were made to investigate the extent of fraudulent activity.

“American families, whose wages have eroded under President Biden’s inflation crisis, have watched as hundreds of billions of their hard-earned tax dollars were lost to criminal activity and fraud because Democrats refused to acknowledge the problem and repeatedly rejected Republican efforts to put basic safeguards in place to protect against this activity,” Jason Smith, Chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee (R-MO), stated this in a statement to The Daily Wire last week. “Congressional Democrats walked away from their oversight responsibilities of getting to the bottom of how this happened, what they could do to prevent it, and even how much has fully been lost, leaving criminals to profit off the backs of taxpayers.”