An Official Named Su

By John Fund

Sunday, April 23, 2023

 

President Biden’s nominee to be secretary of labor is in real danger of not being confirmed.

 

Julie Su, a lifetime labor-union official, isn’t an ordinary nominee. Until 2021, she was California’s labor secretary and presided over perhaps the biggest single example of fraud in the state’s history. The state’s unemployment system paid out tens of billions in expanded Covid-19 unemployment benefits that were subsidized by the federal government.

 

The fraud came after a state auditor warned the state to stop printing Social Security numbers on mail. He was ignored. Others warned that rings of scammers were bilking the system. They, too, were ignored. The Washington Examiner reports that “California reportedly sent $1 billion to fraud rings involving prisoners who were filing fraudulent claims while actively behind bars.”

 

Even Senator Mitt Romney, one of the Republicans most supportive of confirming Biden’s previous cabinet choices, says he has reached his limit in being asked to confirm Julie Su. At her confirmation hearing last Thursday, he said:

 

The fact that under your lead, unemployment insurance payments in California of some $31 billion went to people who were basically receiving money on a criminal basis  . . . $31 billion, that’s about as much as we provided in military aid to Ukraine. That’s almost twice the total budget of the Department of Labor. . . . In this case, your record there is so severely lacking, I don’t know how in the world it makes sense for the president to nominate you to take over this department.

 

Despite this record, Su was confirmed by 50 to 47 as Biden’s deputy secretary of labor in 2021. But several Republicans were absent from that vote, and three of the senators who voted for her have yet to back her promotion: Joe Manchin of West Virginia, Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, and Jon Tester of Montana. All are up for reelection in 2024 and nervous about being linked to Su’s radicalism and incompetence.

 

All the country’s major business groups lined up against Su before her confirmation hearing. They pointed out that Su was also a major force behind California’s Assembly Bill 5, a law that essentially abolished independent contractors in the state. AB 5 was eventually repealed in a referendum by a 58 percent majority of the state’s voters, but not before it temporarily wrecked the state’s trucking industry and exacerbated its supply-chain problems at major ports.

 

“Confirming a labor secretary with a track record of putting roadblocks in the way of solving the current workforce shortage would negatively affect every American, every business (particularly small businesses), and the economy,” wrote a coalition of 32 business groups last month.

 

The Biden administration is chock-full of cabinet officials who aren’t qualified for their roles. Think Jennifer Granholm at Energy and Pete Buttigieg at Transportation. But if the Senate confirms Julie Su, someone with a proven track record of failure in creating jobs and managing taxpayer money will be running a major federal department. That would represent a new low even for the Biden cabinet.