FIRST ON FOX: The Department of Labor announced on Tuesday that it has terminated $400 million dollars in spending it has deemed wasteful through its Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) efforts by rolling back diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI)-related grants from the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA).
The department said DOGE had terminated all of its Unemployment Insurance (UI) ARPA grants, totaling around $400 million in savings, which it said addresses an unemployment system that has been in an “infrastructure crisis riddled with fraud, waste, and abuse.”
Some of the cuts from the $2 trillion piece of legislation signed into law by then-President Joe Biden in 2021, included creating an “Office of the Unemployed Workers’ Advocate” and funding an “Equitable Access Director.”
Other cuts included initiatives to “conduct a business process analysis for equity,” developing an “equity analytics dashboard,” studying the “equity of the unemployment system,” conducting a “DEIA assessment” and funding “equity monitor staff.”
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“America’s unemployment benefits system is facing an infrastructure crisis, riddled with waste, fraud, and abuse,” Labor Department spokesperson Courtney Parella told Fox News Digital. “The Biden administration was given a historic opportunity by Congress to fix it but instead squandered it on bureaucratic and wasteful projects that focused on equitable access rather than advancing access for all Americans in need.”
Parella added that the department will continue working with state workforce agencies nationwide to focus on ways to improve the UI system to better “meet the needs of the American worker” and cut down on fraud, which has been prevalent in recent years, according to several news reports.
Earlier this year, DOGE announced that it had discovered tens of thousands of unemployment claims for improbably old and young claimants that were approved in the years after 2020.
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“This is another incredible discovery by the DOGE team, finding nearly $400 million in fraudulent unemployment payments,” Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer told FOX Business in April. “The Labor Department is committed to recovering Americans’ stolen tax dollars. We will catch these thieves and keep working to root out egregious fraud – accountability is here.”
The Labor Department announcement on Tuesday comes after Fox News Digital first reported in April that the department revealed $1.4 billion of unspent COVID funding would be “returned to taxpayers through the U.S. Department of Treasury’s General Fund,” and added that “action” was “being taken to recover the remaining $2.9 billion.”
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According to the department leaderboard on the DOGE website, last updated on May 11, the Department of Labor ranks in the top 5 of departments that have made DOGE-related cuts, and DOGE overall says it has saved each American taxpayer $1,055.90.
Fox News Digital’s Eric Revell contributed to this report.
