Trump Labor Department Secures Eye-Popping Sum to Return to Taxpayers Amid DOGE Push
2nd April 2025
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.”
Except that they won’t ‘return it back to the taxpayers’, they’ll just spend it on something else. Once money is in the hands of the government, taxpayers don’t ‘get it back’ unless they use a crowbar through the legal system.