Trump’s labor chief threatens to pull unemployment assistance from every state
www.independent.co.uk
Labor chief is ‘putting governors on notice’ with administration’s crusade against alleged fraud

Donald Trump’s administration is threatening to withdraw federal funding for unemployment assistance in all 50 states as part of the president’s nationwide campaign against “fraud” in government spending.

In a letter to the governors of 53 states and territories, acting Labor Secretary Keith Sonderling warned that the federal government would use “every available tool” to combat “waste, fraud and abuse” within state-run unemployment insurance programs, including “withholding administrative funds from states” for the first time in history.

There is no single national program for unemployment support, though the federal government partners with state agencies to support temporary financial assistance to out-of-work Americans. Nearly 2 million people are currently receiving those benefits, while roughly 229,000 people are filing initial jobless claims every week, according to the Labor Department.

  • BarneyPiccolo@lemmy.today
    1·
    2 months ago

    It’s really hard to really cheat in a Midterms. A presidential election comes down to one race in only seven states, it’s fairly easy.

    But there are too many Congressional districts, that are watched too closely by locals, to make it work. The best you can do is manipulate the election environment, and hope it causes enough chaos to benefit your side. But those strategies can often help the other side, too.

    And no matter what you do, if you’ve just been raging shitheads for 2 years, you just piss off enough people that they overwhelm your cheating strategies, and win anyway.

    • Mirshe@lemmy.world
      3·
      2 months ago

      So, interesting points. However, consider that just in the last few years:

      • A Trump ally bought Dominion, the largest producer of electronic ballot boxes and the ones used by a LOT of states. Several studies have shown that via a hardware-side injection, it would be quite easy for anyone with physical access to the…power strip, I think, could manipulate the ballot recording without leaving a significant trace.
      • DHS has asked for voter rolls from all states, and ICE/CBP have conducted raids on prominent voter activism groups.
      • The FBI has also normalized raiding election offices and has seized ballots from at least the 2020 election, and at least one sheriff’s offices has also attempted to do the same in very similar fashion in California, with very similar warrants, looking for very similar “fraud”, and have also attempted to seize ballots.

      The big problem with fucking with a midterm isn’t ease, it’s just scale. When you have cops, the federal and a lot of state and even local DOJs, the President’s personal goon squad (which has now been significantly inflated and equipped), and the FBI willing to harass, intimidate, or arrest voters, steal ballots, and challenge every single race, everywhere, all the time, all backed by think tanks and funding orgs that are backed by some of the richest people in the entire world, it suddenly becomes a lot easier to stop up the gears of democratic elections.

      Sure, your locals can challenge the results. They can make noise. But at the end of the day, “move fast and break things” works surprisingly well as a governance tactic if your desired end result is maintaining power, because by the time people have untangled the knots you’ve woven, you’re already ten steps ahead and "well it’d be REALLY HARD AND EXPENSIVE to run a special election (if your locality even has a legal way to do that - most don’t).