Refund Time: Trump Labor Dept Returning Over a Billion in Unspent COVID Funding to Treasury

A billion here, and a billion there, and pretty soon you're talking real money.

We may soon approach the "real money" stage, and perhaps sooner than we thought - but then, almost everything happening with this second Trump administration is happening faster than we thought. Between the DOGE recommendations and the Cabinet members just acting on their own to cut away the dead weight, the U.S. taxpayers have already been saved a lot of money, and on Tuesday, Secretary of Labor Lori Chavez-DeRemer announced that her department would be returning over a billion dollars in unspent COVID funding to the Treasury.

U.S. Department of Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer announced on Monday that her department will return over $1 billion in unused COVID-era funding back to the taxpayer amid the Trump administration's push for the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to slash waste, fraud and abuse in the federal government.
In a press release, the Labor Department said $1.4 billion of unspent COVID funding will be "returned to taxpayers through the U.S. Department of Treasury’s General Fund" and added that "action" is "being taken to recover the remaining $2.9 billion."
"The roughly $4.3 billion was intended for states to use for temporary unemployment insurance during the pandemic," the press release states. "Instead, several states continued spending millions of dollars despite no longer meeting necessary requirements, which was uncovered in a 2023 audit conducted by the department’s Office of Inspector General."

Now, let's make one thing clear: It's a wondrous thing to see this money being returned. It would be more wondrous to see it applied to the national debt, but it's a start. These COVID funds should never have been appropriated, but they were, and at least the unspent money is headed back to the Treasury. Now, detractors would just point out that it's just being moved from one federal agency to another, but monies held in the Treasury are available for other purposes - like buying some training ammo for Pete Hegseth's new caste of warfighters.

But here's my question: If several states kept spending millions of dollars despite not meeting requirements, where's the investigation of that?

The department explained in the press release that the funding originated from the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act in March 2020 and that the program was meant to provide expanded unemployment insurance for Americans who were not able to work during the pandemic.
The program was closed in 2021, the department said, but the 2023 audit "found four states were allowed to access the funding ‘despite not meeting program requirements,’ totaling over $100 million in spending."

I have some questions.

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Which states were allowed to access the funding? Who had oversight of the funding that the four states were accessing? Was it deliberate, or was there some screwup in the process? What was that "over $100 million" spent on? Is there any way the Labor Department or the Treasury can claw that money back? That's a lot of money, and there's apparently no guarantee it was spent on what it was appropriated for. So, what happened? Did that money just blow away into the ether?

This is, in fact, a great argument as to why the government should remain as close as possible to the taxpaying citizens. Things like pandemic responses should be funded and handled, to the greatest extent possible, by the states. This affair demonstrates that when you add another huge layer of bureaucracy, filtering funds through the federal Colossus and then dribbling it back out to the states, it's not only grossly inefficient, but it is also all too easy for a slip twixt cup and lip.

So, kudos to Lori Chavez-DeRemer and her people for identifying this unspent money and returning it to where it may (hah) do some good. But there are a lot more questions unanswered, and perhaps someone from Attorney General Pam Bondi's organization ought to be looking into them.

Elon Musk and DOGE are bringing much-needed accountability to our out-of-control bureaucracy as they take a chainsaw to rampant waste, fraud, and abuse.

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