Harder Introduces New Bill to Hold EDD Accountable for Failing Central Valley Families

WASHINGTON —Representative Josh Harder (CA-10) has introduced a new bill, the Fix the Unemployment Backlogs Act, which will create a federal standard for state unemployment agencies addressing backlogs of claims. This comes in response to California Employment Development Department (EDD)'s catastrophic failures throughout and before the COVID-19 pandemic.

"It's beyond clear that Sacramento can't be trusted with our unemployment system. Over the last two years, EDD gave out billions in taxpayer dollars to Russian gangsters and Nigerian crime rings while families in the Central Valley called hundreds of times a day and never once got an actual person on the phone," said Rep. Harder. "So I've introduced a bill to set a federal standard for unemployment agencies like EDD. Either they treat our taxpayer dollars right or we cut their funding and find someone else who can do it better."

The bill mandates that any state unemployment agency with a backlog of more than 45,000 cases has six months to bring that backlog down to zero or face losing its administrative funding. During the height of the pandemic, EDD had a backlog of more than 250,000 cases, defined as a case that has gone 21 days without an initial status determination. State unemployment agencies' administrative funding pays for everything from lights to internet to employee payroll and is funded by the federal government.

Click here for more EDD backlog data

Read the bill online here.

###