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Floor Speech

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Mr. WYDEN. Mr. President, first of all, I want it understood that we take a backseat to nobody--nobody--when it comes to fighting this fraud. That is why I negotiated a bipartisan package in the last Congress dealing with a host of issues relating to addressing fraud and making improvements to unemployment insurance. I negotiated that bill with our ranking member, now the chairman of the Finance Committee.

I am a little struck by what is going on here because my colleague, my friend from Oklahoma, was a cosponsor of that proposal. In other words, we did what the American people say they want, which is to have people find common ground on commonsense matters like fighting fraud.

Our bipartisan proposal went after pandemic-era fraud by extending the statute of limits on prosecution. It would help to prevent fraud in the future. It would help States improve their unemployment insurance programs to get benefits out on time in the event of a big economic crash shall like we saw in 2020. It would make better use of data to prevent abuse. It would protect people who got overpayments entirely due to somebody else's mistake, who may not even know it to this day.

I will tell you, I think it is odd at best but certainly disappointing that our Republican colleagues have decided to walk away from a really good bipartisan agreement. The proposal they brought to the floor is much smaller, is much narrower. In fact, instead of looking forward, it is looking backward--no improvements to unemployment insurance, no fraud prevention looking at the future. In fact, the bill before the Senate actually cuts $5 million of crucial fraud-prevention funding that Democrats secured after the pandemic.

So you ask yourself, why are Republicans attempting to make this cut? The nonpartisan experts at the Congressional Budget Office, looked at this narrow proposal my colleagues have brought forward, and they said if Congress were to pass this bill, Republicans would spend more money--more money--trying to track down fraud than they would actually recover from the fraudsters.

Government efficiency is something we are all interested in. You had me at hello on the concept of working on those kinds of issues in a bipartisan way. But here is a Republican anti-fraud proposal that loses taxpayer dollars overall, and to pay for it, they cut future fraud prevention. That just strikes me as defying common sense.

Another issue with this approach I want to highlight is that the bill now before the Senate fails to provide any protection for workers who got overpaid through no fault of their own. Colleagues may remember that when the pandemic UI program was created, it was in the midst of the COVID crisis--highest unemployment since the Great Depression, tens of millions of Americans out of work, entire sectors of our economy essentially mothballed.

Congress scrambled to create an unemployment insurance program for Americans who weren't eligible for traditional unemployment insurance. Without it, a whole lot of people would have gone hungry and lost their homes.

In the rush to get urgently needed relief to those out of work, some States made mistakes, provided a number of workers more in unemployment than they were entitled to. These workers didn't defraud anybody. A lot of those people who received overpayments had no idea they had gotten more money than they should have.

The issue is that some States are running their unemployment insurance programs with decrepit, old systems that can barely keep up, and they made mistakes.

Now 5 years down the line, my colleagues on the other side of the aisle want to claw back these payments--even from people who did nothing wrong. In fact, some of these people to this day aren't even aware they were overpaid. They certainly aren't fraudsters.

States made mistakes in the heat of an economic crisis, and Congress shouldn't be punishing individual workers who had no idea in the first place what was going on.

Final issue with the proposal: The Trump administration has made a mockery of fraud prevention by illegally firing the Department of Labor inspector general.

The inspector general's office successfully oversaw unemployment fraud investigations throughout the pandemic. In my view, firing the inspector general is a big setback in the fight against fraud in the unemployment insurance program.

The Trump administration has also given DOGE unfettered access to unemployment insurance claims data. The bill before the Senate would allow DOGE to falsely accuse innocent workers of fraud years after unemployment insurance helped them keep food on the table during the pandemic. That is not being tough on fraud. That is making innocent people victims.

Democrats are all in--all in--on bringing criminals who defrauded the UI system to justice and building a more reliable, durable unemployment insurance system for the future. That is why, colleagues, we negotiated a really strong, bipartisan antifraud package. For the life of me, I don't understand walking away from that package now, especially in favor of a narrower proposal that would lose taxpayer dollars and sacrifice the effort to fight fraud.

Therefore, I would ask the Senator to modify the request so that the Wyden substitute amendment, which is at the desk and is a text of the Wyden-Crapo Unemployment Insurance Integrity and Accessibility Act, be considered and agreed to; that the bill, as amended, be considered read a third time and passed; and that the motion to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table with no intervening action or debate.

I don't see much to object to this afternoon. We both want to be all in on the fight against fraud. Those were the first words out of my mouth: Let's go all in on fighting this horrendous fraud. That is why we worked so long in a bipartisan way, because you are not the only Republican from the committee who worked with me and it is a large bill and it deals with a big problem. And, for the life of me, I can't figure out why we aren't dealing with the big problem and not creating innocent victims--more of them.

At this point, I guess there is gridlock today, but I want to extend the olive branch again, which I have been doing from day one. I want a big bill that goes after big-time fraud in a very aggressive way. I am still baffled by why we are not out here with a whole lot of Republicans who are cosponsors of my bill, with the Senator from Idaho as the chair, and saying: This is the way we ought to be governing.

I hope we are back.

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Mr. WYDEN. Mr. President, just very briefly, my colleague says nothing is going to happen in the House to fight fraud. I have got to tell you that I don't see any fraud caucus out there in either the Senate or the House. There are no rallies for people who are committing outrageous fraud. I think we ought to move. We ought to move here.

We have done the hard work. We have done the heavy lifting. My colleague from Oklahoma knows what it is like when he is trying to put together a bipartisan bill. We have done that work. I think we ought to move here and then talk to our colleagues in the House. Why don't you now pick up on the hard work we have done and we will get serious about fraud.

So we are going to continue this conversation. I always wanted to work with my colleague from Oklahoma on these kinds of issues, and we are going to stay at it until we deal with big-time fraud in a big-time way, in the U.S. Senate, in a bipartisan way.

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