[Breitbart] The State of California is attempting to blame former President Donald Trump for the fact that fraudsters stole $30 billion in coronavirus relief payments from the state’s Employment Development Department (EDD).
As Breitbart News reported in 2021, the California State Auditor flagged the EDD for gross mismanagement:
The EDD is the agency through which Californians are supposed to obtain unemployment payments and compensation for maternity leave. However, fraud and mismanagement have led to billions of dollars in losses. The EDD system has sent unemployment checks to prison inmates, while truly deserving Californians wait months for money that they need.
The report itself adds: “EDD did not take substantive action to bolster its fraud detection efforts for its unemployment insurance program until months into the pandemic, resulting in payments of about $10.4 billion for claims that it has since determined may be fraudulent.”
Now, after an inquiry from Rep. James Comer (R-KY), the new chair of the U.S. House Committee on Oversight and Accountability, California is trying to claim that Trump’s supposedly weak federal leadership was to blame.
Ironically, it was Democrats, and not the Trump administration, that insisted on distributing coronavirus relief through state unemployment systems, rather than simply using checks from the federal government. They were acting on advice from liberal economists who wanted to see unemployment expanded as a welfare system.
On Wednesday, Rep. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) argued that Republicans are singling out Democrat-governed states like California and New York for investigation, while ignoring fraud in conservative states.
Many states suffered from similar fraud, though California suffered the most — a fact that some say reflects the state’s large population, but which critics say is a reflection of a dysfunctional, Democrat-run state bureaucracy.
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