State unemployment benefit requests up 28% last week; fraudulent claims abound
The state of Washington received 138,733 new requests for jobless benefits last week, bringing the total number of claims filed to more than 1.6 million since the beginning of March, the state Employment Security Department reported Thursday.
The number of new claims filed for the week ending May 16 increased nearly 27% from the 109,425 filed a week prior, but state officials attribute some of that to an influx of fraudulent claims totaling “hundreds of millions of dollars.”
The employment department has zeroed in on stopping the increase in fraudulent claims by implementing new security measures and working closely with federal law enforcement to investigate the crimes and recoup the stolen money, said Suzi LeVine, Employment Security Commissioner.
The ESD is hiring more than 100 additional staff members to answer questions on its fraud hotline. It also has added authentication features to its system. The flood of fraudulent claims, however, is adding one to two days in payment-processing time to validate applicant information, LeVine said.
“We do have definitive proof that the countermeasures we put into place are working,” LeVine said. “We have prevented hundreds of millions of additional dollars from going out to criminals and prevented thousands of fraudulent claims from being filed.”
Those filing the fraudulent claims are believed to have gained individuals’ personal information from breaches of other databases and not the ESD’s system, according to the department.
In data released by the state Thursday, the greatest number of unemployment benefit applications statewide were from workers in the educational services sector, with 16,924 new claims. Health care and social assistance workers filed 15,759 new claims, and manufacturing workers filed 10,789.
To date, the department has paid out more than $3.8 billion in unemployment benefits since early March.
— The Spokesman-Review
Mnuchin says ‘strong likelihood’ US will need more stimulus
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said Congress will very likely need to pass more stimulus legislation for the U.S. economy, as the nation struggles to recover from the coronavirus outbreak.
“I think there is a strong likelihood we will need another bill,” he said Thursday at an online event hosted by the Hill newspaper — but he also reiterated the Trump administration’s position that more stimulus isn’t needed immediately.
“We’re going to step back for a few weeks and think very carefully if we need to spend more money and how we’re going to do that,” Mnuchin said. He said he had spoken to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi last week about implementation of the $2.2 trillion stimulus Congress passed in late March.
The House passed an additional $3 trillion stimulus last week but Republicans in control of the Senate have said they won’t consider it. President Donald Trump and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell have said they instead want to evaluate the effect of some $5 trillion already aimed at the economy by Congress and the Federal Reserve.
Meanwhile, the economy continues to deteriorate as Americans practice social distancing to curb the spread of the virus.
Another 2.4 million people filed for unemployment benefits last week, the Labor Department reported, bringing the total to nearly 39 million since March. The two-month total is roughly equivalent to all of the initial claims filed during the Great Recession.
Pelosi and many Democrats have said state governments and hospitals in particular are in dire need of more federal assistance.
Resistance is growing to McConnell’s position among members of his own party.
Several Senate Republicans have signed on to a $500 billion package of state and local aid, including Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, who faces a tough reelection fight in November.
Another endangered Republican, Colorado Sen. Cory Gardner, has criticized plans to adjourn the Senate for a Memorial Day recess without further action to respond to the virus.
Mnuchin on Thursday said he expects that in the second quarter ending in June, the economy will “bottom-out” and by the end of the year, the GDP increase will be “gigantic.”
— Bloomberg News
Trump orders houses of worship reopened, vows to override states
WASHINGTON, D.C. — President Donald Trump said he would order states to allow places of worship to reopen from stay-at-home restrictions imposed to combat the coronavirus outbreak, promising to override any governor who refuses without explaining what authority he had to do so.
“The governors need to do the right thing and allow these very important essential places of faith to open right now,” Trump said Friday in a statement to reporters at the White House. “By this weekend.”
“If they don’t do it I will override the governors,” he added. Churches, synagogues and mosques would be declared “essential” services under CDC guidelines, he said. The president left the briefing without taking questions.
It’s far from clear Trump can impose his views on states that want to keep houses of worship closed or restricted. Health and safety rules are primarily the domain of the states, in part because of the explicit preservation of state authority in the Constitution’s 10th Amendment and Supreme Court rulings that have enforced limits on federal power.
White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany declined to say what law gives Trump the power to override state orders to churches, calling it a hypothetical question.
“The president will strongly encourage every governor” to allow churches to reopen, she said.
But the president has shown increasing exasperation with state social distancing regulations that have collapsed the U.S. economy, as he spurs Americans to return to normal economic and social life. The move is also a nod to Trump’s strong support among evangelical Christians at a time when overall public approval for his response to the coronavirus outbreak is sliding.
An ABC News/Ipsos poll published Friday found that 60% of Americans disapprove of Trump’s handling of the outbreak, with just 39% approving. There have been more than 1.5 million cases of the disease in the U.S. and at least 94,000 deaths in what is the world’s largest publicly reported outbreak, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.
— Bloomberg News
State sues Trump administration over which college students should get coronavirus aid
The state of Washington sued the Department of Education on Tuesday, adding to a string of lawsuits alleging the Trump administration is ignoring the will of Congress in limiting relief to some college students affected by the coronavirus pandemic.
Late Thursday, the Education Department released an updated statement saying its guidance to schools about who was eligible for assistance was not intended to carry the force of law.
That guidance became the source of the lawsuit pending in Eastern Washington, and it’s unclear if the latest position from the Trump administration would affect the legal action.
The federal lawsuit, filed in Spokane, names Education Secretary Betsy DeVos and argues her agency’s guidance on awarding billions of dollars in federal assistance to students is in violation of the law. The guidance defines the money awarded under a $2 trillion assistance package passed by Congress in March as federal aid, and thus limits who can receive the money for housing, textbooks and other costs of continuing instruction during the pandemic.
“As a result of the Department’s unauthorized eligibility restriction, over 85,000 Washington higher education students who desperately need financial assistance have been excluded from federal help,” the Washington Attorney General’s Office wrote in its lawsuit.
Attorney General Bob Ferguson’s office said in a statement that the requirements mandated by the Education Department would limit assistance to vulnerable groups, including students who are studying in Washington as members of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrival program, or DREAMers, noncitizens who arrived in the country as children of migrant parents.
The exclusion also makes it more difficult for colleges to determine eligibility for students who don’t file the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or FAFSA, form. Washington ranks 49th out of 50 states for students filling out the form seeking financial assistance, with less than half of annual graduates filing a FAFSA, according to the Washington Student Achievement Council. Those may be students who are receiving financial assistance through the GI Bill after serving in the military, those whose family incomes put them just above the threshold to receive federal Pell Grants and others.
“The pandemic has caused unprecedented disruption for all of Washington’s students without regard for the arbitrary, harmful lines the Department of Education has drawn,” Gov. Jay Inslee said in a joint news release with Ferguson announcing the lawsuit.
The Education Department had previously said it’s bound by a different federal law to determine whether a student is eligible to receive assistance under the program, and has asked universities and colleges to ensure those applying are eligible in order to avoid penalties. Those requirements include receiving a high school diploma or GED, maintaining a C average in courses and taking at least half the full-time workload.
The lawsuit filed in Washington, and a similar one filed last week by the Community Colleges of California, alleges that Congress intended to allow the assistance to go beyond students who receive other types of financial aid. The restriction by the Education Department in releasing funds is a decision only Congress, not the White House, can make, the lawsuits allege.
None of the state’s colleges or universities is party to the Washington lawsuit.
— The Spokesman-Review
White House concerned with coronavirus spread in LA area, asks CDC to investigate
LOS ANGELES — While some parts of the country are seeing major progress in fighting the coronavirus, Dr. Deborah Birx, the White House’s coronavirus response coordinator, on Friday singled out Los Angeles as one of three regions where persistent spread remains a significant concern.
Speaking with reporters at the White House, Birx gave a mostly upbeat assessment of the nation’s progress but said the Los Angeles metropolitan area, which includes Orange County, is continuing to see problems, along with Washington, D.C., and Chicago.
“Even though Washington has remained closed, L.A. has remained closed, Chicago has remained closed, we still see these ongoing cases,” she said.
Brix asked the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to work with those areas “to really understand where are these new cases coming from, and what do we need to do to prevent them in the future.”
Los Angeles County is the epicenter of the coronavirus outbreak in California, accounting for about 56% of the state’s total deaths and almost half of nearly 90,000 confirmed infections. The county’s death toll rose Thursday to 2,021, with more than 42,000 confirmed cases.
“This is a very sad milestone for us,” county Public Health Director Barbara Ferrer said Thursday after the deaths exceeded 2,000.
Los Angeles County Supervisor Hilda Solis said she hoped officials could ease stay-at-home restrictions soon but urged caution.
“I wish that we could speed things up,” she said. “The virus is still out there waiting for us to let our guard down.”
Despite the average daily death toll, which has remained at a stubborn plateau for weeks, there were new signs that even Los Angeles is beginning to turn the corner.
The coronavirus transmission rate in the nation’s most populous county is now in its best position since the magnitude of the outbreak became clear in March.
Still, officials remain concerned that warm temperatures and quarantine fatigue could drive people from their homes over the Memorial Day weekend, resulting in crowding at parks and beaches that could threaten to undo some of the progress the state has made.
— Los Angeles Times
DOE says supercomputers handling COVID-19 data are hacker targets
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Energy Department officials said they have noticed a spike in cyberattacks on national laboratories and that foreign nations are interested in U.S. coronavirus research.
“We are seeing some increased activities around our national laboratories in particular, with regard to cyber activity. Slight increases in the number of hits that we see to our computing facilities there,” Energy Secretary Dan Brouillette said Thursday at a meeting with an advisory board.
“We have not had any problems” with cyberattacks, said Paul Dabbar, the DOE’s undersecretary for science who oversees the network of 17 national labs. “But, as the secretary pointed out, we’ve had some increase.”
Government agencies and private experts say cyberattacks have increased during the pandemic as the number of people working remotely — a larger pool of targets for hackers — has surged worldwide during stay-at-home restrictions.
Brouillette said foreign powers want to crack open American research on the virus. “We know that there are nation-states around the world who are interested in some of the research that’s being done in the laboratories, some of the data sets that exist within the laboratories,” he said.
