The Trump administration is planning to test the feasibility of the Labor Department doing unemployment claims intake instead of states, according to a late August email sent from the department to state unemployment insurance directors.
Labor intends to pilot a department-hosted platform, unemployment.gov, with a few states by the end of the year. It would take initial claims and provide identity proofing and work authorization services, it said in the email, which was obtained by Nextgov/FCW.
While the Biden administration’s Labor Department also made forays into helping states with technology for the jobless aid program and assisting some states with initial claims intake, this latest pilot could potentially give the department more sensitive data about people applying for benefits.
Labor is already weighing the creation of a national claims database after President Donald Trump issued a March executive order that called for the Labor secretary to access all unemployment data and related payment records in March.
The administration has also pushed for federal agencies to access sensitive state-level information in several programs. While the White House often says that the federal government needs this data for anti-fraud work, critics have raised concerns about its potential for surveillance.
In the unemployment context, those concerns center around who has access to claims data under that centralized intake and how they would use it.
Labor did not respond to a request for comment from Nextgov/FCW.
“Given what has happened at other agencies, would the Trump administration share this with ICE or use it to otherwise surveil Americans applying for UI?” asked one unemployment expert of the new pilot. They requested that their name be withheld for fear of retribution.
The department’s plan to include work authorization as part of this pilot could mean that other parts of the government may also have access to the data to check that claimants are eligible for the benefit.
Generally, workers must have a valid work authorization to get unemployment benefits. The number of people without those permits obtaining benefits is minuscule, said Michele Evermore, who formerly worked on unemployment insurance modernization in the Labor Department during the Biden administration.
Labor is already encouraging states to run all claims submitted by people who aren’t U.S. citizens through a Department of Homeland Security immigration status database. Evermore’s read on the department’s mention of work authorization is that Labor would be ramping up these checks as part of this forthcoming pilot.
There is also the cybersecurity risk that comes from creating an enticing target of centrally-located data, instead of housing that data across different state systems.
Unemployment insurance data that is normally confined to Labor’s watchdog office has already been accessed in new ways by the Department of Government Efficiency.
“When DOGE is tweeting about UI data, that’s not good stewardship of [personally identifiable information],” Evermore said.
If the department moves forward with the effort, it may find it difficult to actually do claim intake beyond identity proofing and work authorization verification, Evermore added, as the jobless aid program and eligibility standards for it vary across states — a challenge that came up during the Biden–era pilots, too.
Labor started helping states access identity services after the pandemic, during which time the program saw a massive uptick in fraudulent applications. It also tried to help states with claims filing as well, before eventually pivoting to a modular technology strategy for modernizing the unemployment insurance system.
Now, the department is moving states that are already using the General Services Administration’s Login.gov to the identity management service’s new, higher security level of identity checks, it told states in the email. That more stringent option requires facial recognition matches to identify claimants online.
Labor has also pushing states wanting to offer an in-person option for identity checks from a partnership it had with the U.S. Postal Service to a USPS option hosted by Login.gov itself.
