You may remember Julie Su from multiple failed confirmation hearings during the Biden administration. Even by the standards of the Biden administration, the $32 billion in fraud that happened on Su’s watch seemed like it might be a bit too much.
Under Su, the head of California Labor and Workforce Development Agency, an estimated $32.6 billion in unemployment insurance EDD fraud took place.
And when I say fraud took place, I mean the kind of fraud that a small child could have spotted. Literally. One of the applicants was using the name “Poopy Pants”.
In today’s article, ‘California’s ‘Wealth’ Tax Wouldn’t Even Cover the Cost of Fraud’, I noted that “Prison inmates received over $1 billion in fraudulent claims including $421,000 paid out to death row inmates. The Employment Development Department flagged 345,000 disability insurance claims and found that 98% of the 27,000 medical providers listed on the claims were fake.”
The buck (or the 32 billion bucks) for this stopped with Su who chose ‘equity’ over integrity.
Su has said that no one could have seen the fraud coming. In reality, for more than a decade, California’s independent auditor had issued warnings about the unemployment office’s vulnerabilities. No one, certainly not Su, acted on that intelligence.
The proximate cause of the EDD’s sudden breakdown was Su’s determination that checking a beneficiary’s eligibility for unemployment payments would likely exacerbate social inequality.
Among Democrats however, you can only fail upwards and so Biden nominated her as Labor Secretary and Mamdani has now appointed her the Deputy Mayor for Economic Justice
Just think how big of a fraud Su can watch over in New York City.
