Julie Su prepares to forgive herself for Julie Su’s mistakes

Julie Su is giving herself a gift. Now serving as Joe Biden’s acting U.S. Secretary of Labor, Su is prepared to force U.S. taxpayers to pay off California’s loss of some $30 billion in federal Covid-relief funds.

Those staggering losses occurred while Su was California’s secretary of labor.

That news is buried in California’s 2022 annual comprehensive financial report, an otherwise obscure document filed on March 15. In the very last paragraph, on page 186 of the sprawling report, just before anaphrodisiac spreadsheets included as “Required Supplementary

Information,” California’s state controller notes that Su’s U.S. Department of Labor has issued helpful “guidance” for state finance officials in “Unemployment Insurance Program Letter 05-24.”

The U.S. Department of Labor’s DOL 05-24 memo notes that a COVID-ERA agreement between the feds and state unemployment departments “required states to use the CARES Act funds ‘for the purpose for which the money was paid to the state’ and to ‘take such action as reasonably may be necessary to recover for the account of the United States all benefit amounts erroneously paid and restore any lost or misapplied funds paid to the state for benefits or the administration of the Agreement.” Do that, “and, in many instances, the state will not need to take retroactive action to resolve monitoring findings.”

Under Su, California lost most of the CARES Act money to fraudsters, including international crime gangs. And how will federal DOL officials know whether California took “such action as reasonably necessary to recover” those stolen billions?

Because California officials have told them so. Today, the state controller notes, California “is waiting on final federal approval of EDD’S request as indicated in the February 2024