San Francisco Chronicle Delivers Devastating Look at Department Under Biden Nominee Julie Su’s Leadership

The San Francisco Chronicle published a devastating look inside California’s Employment Development Department, an important agency inside Biden nominee Julie Su’s Department of Labor. The article includes interviews with workers inside the department that detail its failures.

Su recently admitted that the department paid out $11 billion in fraudulent jobless claims since the pandemic began in March 2020. That number could climb as high as $31 billion. The fraud came after a state auditor warned the state to stop printing social security numbers on mail. They didn’t stop.

Senator Susan Collins grilled Su during her confirmation hearing this week about the historic amount of fraud at the department.

Julie Su’s actions resulted in the most catastrophic fraud on California taxpayers in the state’s history. With full knowledge of her failed record, Joe Biden wants to promote her to a position at a federal agency that oversees thirty department subdivisions.

Read the entire San Francisco Chronicle article here. 

San Francisco Chronicle: Is California’s EDD Fixing Its Problems? Here’s What Agents Say From The Inside

March 19, 2021 | Carolyn Said

The angry callers are hard enough. After days of dialing and hours on hold, some scream and curse once someone finally answers.

But the despondent callers are much more wrenching. The woman who said her six children had not eaten in a day. The sobbing man about to be evicted. The woman who had lost her house to foreclosure. The family living in a car.

Those calls haunt claims representatives at California’s Employment Development Department.

“Sometimes I don’t know if I have the stomach for this,” said an EDD phone agent hired this summer, who was granted anonymity in accordance with The Chronicle’s policy on confidential sources. “I get callers every week who are in the pit of despair and darkness.”

Millions of Californians, thrown out of work by shelter-in-place guidelines that started one year ago, turned to EDD for unemployment benefits. The agency was quickly overwhelmed. EDD’s call center became notorious as a nightmarish bureaucracy that mired jobless people in Kafkaesque quests for help.

Thousands upon thousands of jobless people said they couldn’t get the benefits they desperately needed.

Read the rest of the article here.