Project 2025 Tracker / What’s done, what’s next

18. Department of Labor and Related Agencies · Minor

Review the $2 billion American Rescue Plan UI procurements

Partially done

598 18. Department of Labor and Related Agencies

“DOL should review all actual or planned procurements against the $2 billion (under the American Rescue Plan Act) for UI fraud detection, accessibility, and equity investments. These funds do not have appropriations timelines and have very minimal statutory descriptions of the intended purpose.”

What has happened

  1. Partially done

    The Department's Inspector General audited part of the American Rescue Plan unemployment insurance money — the equity-and-access tranche — and found that the Employment and Training Administration had not required states to show evidence that the access problems their grant projects addressed actually existed, so that more than $20.7 million may have gone to projects that improved nothing. ETA responded by rewriting its funding-opportunity template to demand quantitative and qualitative evidence of need and by revising its standard operating procedure for discretionary competitive awards. A review of one tranche with corrective action taken, not the review of all actual and planned procurements against the $2 billion that the Quote asks for.

Research log

What was searched, and what didn’t count as evidence

Research notes

  • The audit is report 19-25-006-03-315, ETA Did Not Ensure ARPA Grants Demonstrated Improvements in Access to Unemployment Benefits, issued 2025-08-28; it and ETA’s corrective action are recorded in the OIG’s semiannual report, which is the readable Primary document (oig.dol.gov answers 200 to a browser User-Agent even though dol.gov does not).
  • The report still carries three open recommendations and $2,827,736 in unresolved questioned costs in the semiannual report’s appendix, which is why the item is partial rather than done.
  • The Quote says “$2 billion”; the statute provided $2 billion in total, of which the $1 billion fraud-prevention, equitable-access and timely-payment tranche is the one audited here.
Action
other
Object
American Rescue Plan Act UI modernization funds
ID
1648