STATE DEFENDS EFFORTS

Awash in jobless claims

Gov. Andrew Cuomo and his top aide, Melissa DeRosa, defended their handling on Friday of the state’s unemployment system meltdown, even as they admitted they were aware it struggled during the nation’s last major economic crisis.

The state’s unemployment system still runs on ancient mainframe computers that have been unable to keep up with demand from 1.8 million New Yorkers filing claims in recent weeks, as the state shut down to slow COVID-19.

“With all due respect, in the last financial crisis we had 300,000 people who were unemployed in 2008 and that crushed the system — we’re talking about [1.8] million in the last seven weeks, so we haven’t experienced anything like this period,” DeRosa said in response to questions from The Post as she sat next to Cuomo.

“And there’s all of these different things when you go through government, where you say, ‘Why do you do this? Why do you do this?’ ” she continued. “If we had spent $20 million to upgrade the tech system … when there wasn’t a crisis at the moment, I’m sure we would’ve gotten calls from publications saying: ‘Why are you wasting taxpayer funds on a tech system?’ ”

She added, “We’re literally building the plane while we’re trying to fly it.”

The system has flailed for weeks, despite emergency efforts to keep it upright.

State officials have touted a deal with Google to streamline the unemployment application process, and the Labor Department now has 3,100 employees and contractors processing claims.

At one point, officials even attempted to manage the flood of applications with a ration system that designated days for people to apply based on their last names.

“We’re continuing to try to streamline the process. We’re adding more bodies. We’re doing literally everything we can … and none of that matters to people who are still struggling,” DeRosa reiterated.

More than 200,000 applications were caught in the backlog in April, officials acknowledged, but current figures weren’t available.

Officials say they’ve paid out $6.8 billion in benefits since the crisis began, up from $2.1 billion during all of last year.

“It is not like anything else,” Cuomo (above) said. “There are more unemployed today than since the Great Depression, so you would have to go back to the Great Depression to come up with a comparable situation.”

This isn’t the first time the Labor Department’s system has buckled under heavy loads. In 2009, officials shut it down twice in two days in January as it struggled to keep up with surging demand caused by the Great Recession.