OPINION:
You have to wonder sometimes if Congress has its collective head in the sand. Or it just doesn’t care what happens to the money it authorizes after it’s out the door. Reports that billions, perhaps tens or even hundreds of billions in taxpayer dollars may have been stolen from the people through fraudulent claims for relief have been met with stony silence by congressional leaders.
None of them, at least no one in the majority party, has been willing to investigate what happened and why or seems the least bit interested in what happened to the money, $663.8 billion in all, paid out in expanded benefits through three high-risk, temporary unemployment insurance programs authorized during the pandemic.
What we do know, thanks to a recent report issued by the Department of Labor’s Office of Inspector General, is that a sizable portion of the money sent out through these programs — Pandemic Unemployment Assistance, Pandemic Emergency Unemployment Compensation and Federal Pandemic Unemployment Compensation — did not get to the intended recipients.
The OIG audit focused on unemployment insurance benefit payments made between March 28, 2020, and March 14, 2021. “As of March 14, 2021, State Workforce Agencies had drawn down $472.2 billion in federal funds to pay UI benefits for PUA, PEUC, and FPUC,” the report says. “Of the $472.2 billion funds paid in federal UI funds, almost a third — 28% — was drawn down by four states that the department chose to focus on when compiling its report.
In these states — California, Georgia, Kentucky and Michigan — the OIG determined that 42% of the benefits were paid improperly over the six-month period it examined in depth. As if that were not bad enough, it also found that 14% of the benefits, nearly $10 billion, “likely went to fraudsters.”
The numbers keep changing. Before Labor’s OIG issued its report, the White House put an $80 billion figure on the amount lost to fraud and other improper payments. Outside experts cited by the committee say it could be as high as $400 billion. Either way, it’s real money. The people deserve an answer but Congress, in its infinite wisdom, refuses to look into the matter any further.
Capitol Hill Republicans who have been raising concerns about possible fraud since the fall of 2020, such as Ohio Rep. Brad Wenstrup, have been mystified by the majority party’s unwillingness to examine the issue further. Things are so polarized that when Mr. Wenstrup, a member of the House Committee on Ways and Means, offered a resolution of inquiry in September, the committee’s Democratic majority refused to let it move forward.
The stonewalling needs to stop. It probably will if the Ways and Means Committee has a new chairman in January — which, according to the generic ballot tests, seems highly likely. But between now and then, the congressional Republicans like Wenstrup who’ve led the charge to find out where the money that was paid out to people to stay home and not go to work during the lockdown went should keep making noise. The spread of COVID-19 caused an unprecedented peacetime intervention in the economy by the feds and by state governments led by people who believed, incredibly, that the government had resources sufficient to mitigate the consequences of shutting a $20 trillion economy down for an indefinite period.
The lockdowns didn’t work. COVID-19 still spread and it was still killing people in large numbers — at least that’s what the official figures show — even while businesses were shut down. Paying people not to work is about as good an idea as paying farmers not to farm. But the government did it anyway.
Now, when they should be breaking down the doors to assess the consequences, the people who can call those hearings prefer to look the other way as if nothing ever happened. It’s incredible, but there you have it. Congressional Democrats don’t want to find out if the bonus unemployment payments worked as intended or if they were stolen by “fraudsters.” The evidence is already there proving that bad things happened. Shame on them for blocking an inquiry.
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