Press Releases

(As prepared for delivery)

Democrats strongly agree that those who took advantage of the COVID crisis to commit fraud must be held accountable. Indeed, it was Ways and Means Democrats that put $2 billion in the American Rescue Plan to fight fraud. Every House Republican voted against those investments to prevent fraud and hold criminals accountable.

With this funding, the Department of Labor has built important new tools to detect and prevent fraud, deployed crisis teams to help states investigate fraud, and is modernizing information technology systems that were at the heart of many of the pandemic challenges. Thanks to House Democrats’ American Rescue Plan funding, the Department of Labor Inspector General has already quadrupled its investigations staff and prosecuted over a thousand criminals.

Democrats took action to hold organized crime rings defrauding the federal government to account. Republicans’ first bill addressing unemployment insurance cuts these investments, leaving states in deeper disarray.

This legislation slashes the fraud fund from the American Rescue Plan. It favors contractors who enabled fraud during the pandemic over the hard-working state workers who were actually on the frontlines of getting benefits out during the pandemic. The bill completely ignores the recommendations from the Republicans’ own hearing witnesses earlier this month to modernize state unemployment systems.

That’s what this bill would do about fraud. Needless to say, more harm than good.

State UI systems have been underfunded for far too long, and Republicans’ attempts to further weaken these systems only leave them more vulnerable to bad actors in the event of future recessions or crises. Instead of reinforcing these vital systems to prevent future errors, the Majority has laid their focus on surprise-billing American workers while cutting funding to agencies actively holding those who committed identity theft and fraud accountable.

Instead of punishing organized crime, this bill would punish America’s workers. It would tell states to hire “investigators” and bill workers for state payment errors innocent workers did not know about and were not responsible for. And it would have states send those bills as long as 10 years after the mistake was made. These surprise bills would punish America’s families all while stunting accountability for actual criminals.

I am proud of the work that this Committee did to help Americans when they needed it most. We stepped in when millions of workers found themselves jobless overnight through no fault of their own. Congress ensured they could feed their children and pay their rent. The numbers speak for themselves. These benefits kept millions out of poverty in 2020 and 2021, making the difference for families in communities in every corner of our country. And it served as the trampoline to enable our incredible economic recovery, with record job creation in both years of President Biden’s term so far.

This Committee should indeed remain committed to the work of preventing fraud, but this bill does the opposite: it cuts off ongoing federal efforts to prosecute criminals and hurts the very workers and families we are charged to protect in the first place. 

With that, I yield back the balance of my time.