President Joe Biden’s administration is asking Congress to agree to pay more than $1.6 billion to help clean up the mess of fraud against the massive government coronavirus pandemic relief programs.
In a strategy announced Thursday, the administration called for money and more time to prosecute cases, to put into place new ways to prevent identity theft and to help people whose identities were stolen.
On a call with reporters, White House American Rescue Plan coordinator Gene Sperling had hope that Congress, including the GOP-controlled House that is often hostile to the Democratic administration, would see the spending as an investment.
“It’s just so clear and the evidence is so strong that a dollar smartly spent here will return to the taxpayers, or save, at least $10,” Sperling said, pointing to recoveries that have already happened. The U.S. Secret Service last year got back $286 million sent out in fraudulently obtained loans through the Small Business Administration.
Sperling said the request would be part of the budget proposal Biden is scheduled to make March 9 — but the bulk of it will be separate from the one-year appropriation request. Details would need to be ironed out with Congress.
Soon after the swaths of the U.S. economy were shut down after the coronavirus hit the country in 2020, Congress began authorizing massive relief measures to help governments, businesses and individuals who were impacted. Relief measures — some signed by Biden and some by his predecessor, Donald Trump — totaled nearly $6 trillion. That’s more than the government spent annually before the pandemic.
Money went to boost unemployment insurance programs, help those in the gig economy who lost work, cover government costs and keep businesses afloat.
“On the whole, those programs did enormous good,” Sperling said. “There were also cases where guardrails were unnecessarily lowered, which led to unnecessary and massive fraud.”
A congressional committee found that financial technology companies did not properly screen applicants for the giant Paycheck Protection Program. Fraudulent claims for unemployment benefits overwhelmed state computer systems, which sometimes had trouble identifying the fake ones while slowing down many legitimate filings. The Labor Department estimated there was $164 billion in improper unemployment fraud payments alone — much of it to fraudsters
Many of the scams relied on fake or stolen personal information.
Biden’s plans aim to deal with prosecutions and prevention. He’s asking for $600 million for prosecution, including funds to create at least 10 new Justice Department strike forces in addition to the three that already exist to go after criminal syndicates and other fraudsters. He’s also calling on increasing the statute of limitations for such crimes to 10 years from the current five, giving more time to investigate and prosecute cases.
And he’s calling for policy changes to make sure that the Labor Department Inspector General’s Office has ongoing access to data showing where the same identity was used to apply for benefits in multiple states. That office and other inspector general offices would share at least $300 million to hire investigators.
Biden is also planning eventually to issue an executive order directing federal agencies on how to take action on identity fraud, including modernizing government systems to prevent identity theft.
A portion of the money would go to improve a Federal Trade Commission website, IdentityTheft.gov, a place for people to report identity theft and get help.
The proposal also notes that $1.6 billion from the American Rescue Plan — the last of the big relief measures, adopted in 2021 — will be made available by June to help states improve their anti-identity theft measures.
Britain’s former health minister on Wednesday denied wrongdoing after a newspaper published extracts of private messages he sent in the first weeks of the coronavirus pandemic.
The Daily Telegraph said the exchanges show that then-Health Secretary Matt Hancock ignored scientific advice to test everyone entering nursing homes for COVID-19. Hancock said the WhatsApp messages had been deceptively edited, with key lines omitted to give a “distorted account.”
Hancock said he had wanted to test everyone entering care homes for the coronavirus, but the U.K. lacked the capacity at the time, so priority was put on testing people being discharged from hospitals into the homes.
“The messages imply Matt simply overruled clinical advice. That is categorically untrue,” said a statement released through a spokesman. “He went as far as was possible, as fast as possible, to expand testing and save lives.”
Like many countries, the U.K. had little capacity to test for coronavirus when the pandemic began. The virus spread rapidly through nursing homes in the initial months of the country’s first outbreak in 2020, leading to around 20,000 deaths.
Britain is due to hold a public inquiry into authorities’ handling of the pandemic, but the hearings have yet to begin.
Hancock’s statement said “the right place for this analysis of what happened in the pandemic is in the inquiry.”
The Telegraph said it obtained 2.3 million words from Isabel Oakeshott, a journalist who helped Hancock write a memoir. Oakeshott, a critic of the stringent lockdowns imposed during the pandemic, defended leaking the messages, saying she had done it to avoid a “whitewash” of the crisis.
James Bethell, who served as a junior health minister under Hancock, said “the reality was there was a very, very limited number” of coronavirus tests in the first months of the pandemic.
“The thing that held us back was not a dispute about the clinical advice. It was simply the operational ability to deliver tests,” Bethell told the BBC.
Hancock resigned from the government in June 2021 after breaching social distancing rules that were then in effect by kissing an aide with whom he was having an affair in his office at the Department of Health.
For the second day in a row, China on Wednesday dismissed U.S. suggestions that the COVID-19 pandemic may have been triggered by a virus that leaked from a Chinese laboratory.
Responding to comments by FBI Director Christopher Wray, Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Mao Ning said the involvement of the U.S. intelligence community was evidence enough of the “politicization of origin tracing.”
“By rehashing the lab-leak theory, the U.S. will not succeed in discrediting China, and instead, it will only hurt its own credibility,” Mao said.
“We urge the U.S. to respect science and facts … stop turning origin tracing into something about politics and intelligence, and stop disrupting social solidarity and origins cooperation,” she said.
In an interview with Fox News that aired Tuesday, Wray said, “The FBI has for quite some time now assessed that the origins of the pandemic are most likely a potential lab incident in (central China’s) Wuhan.”
“Here you are talking about a potential leak from a Chinese government-controlled lab,” Wray said.
Referring to efforts to trace the origin of the coronavirus, he added, “I will just make the observation that the Chinese government, it seems to me, has been doing its best to try to thwart and obfuscate the work here, the work that we’re doing, the work that our U.S. government and close foreign partners are doing. And that’s unfortunate for everybody.”
On Tuesday, Mao pushed back at a report from the U.S. Department of Energy that assessed with “low confidence” that the virus that was first detected in Wuhan in late 2019 leaked from a nearby government laboratory.
The report hasn’t been made public and officials in Washington stressed that U.S. agencies are not in agreement on the origin of the virus.
Mao on Tuesday insisted that China has been “open and transparent” in the search for the virus’ origins and has “shared the most data and research results on virus tracing and made important contributions to global virus tracing research.”
A World Health Organization expert group said last year that “key pieces of data” to explain how the pandemic began were still missing. The scientists cited avenues of research that were needed, including studies evaluating the role of wild animals and environmental studies in places where the virus might have first spread.
The Associated Press has previously reported that the Chinese government was strictly controlling research into the origin of the pandemic that has killed more than 6.8 million people worldwide, clamping down on some work and promoting fringe theories that it could have come from outside the country.
Some scientists are open to the lab-leak theory, but many scientists believe the virus came from animals, mutated, and jumped to people, as has happened with other viruses in the past. Experts say the origin of the pandemic may not be known for many years — if ever.
COVID-19’s origins remain hazy. Three years after the start of the pandemic, it’s still unclear whether the coronavirus that causes the disease leaked from a lab or spread to humans from an animal.
This much is known: When it comes to COVID-19 misinformation, any new report on the virus’ origin quickly triggers a relapse and a return of misleading claims about the virus, vaccines and masks that have reverberated since the pandemic began.
It happened again this week after the Energy Department confirmed that a classified report determined, with low confidence, that the virus escaped from a lab. Within hours, online mentions of conspiracy theories involving COVID-19 began to rise, with many commenters saying the classified report was proof they were right all along.
Far from definitive, the Energy Department’s report is the latest of many attempts by scientists and officials to identify the origin of the virus, which has now killed nearly 7 million people after being first detected in the central Chinese city of Wuhan in late 2019.
The report has not been made public, and officials in Washington stressed that a variety of U.S. agencies are not in agreement on the origin.
Many scientists believe the likeliest explanation is that the coronavirus that causes COVID-19 jumped from animals to humans, possibly at Wuhan’s Huanan market, a scenario backed up by multiple studies and reports. The World Health Organization has said that while an animal origin remains most likely, the possibility of a lab leak must be investigated further before it can be ruled out.
People should be open-minded about the evidence used in the Energy Department’s assessment, according to virologist Angela Rasmussen. But she said that without evaluating the evidence contained in the classified report, there’s no reason to challenge the conclusion that the virus spread naturally.
“We can and do know what the scientific evidence shows,” Rasmussen tweeted Tuesday. “The available evidence still shows zoonotic emergence at Huanan market.”
Many of those citing the report as proof, however, seemed uninterested in the evidence. They seized on the report and said it suggests the experts were wrong when it came to masks and vaccines, too.
“School closures were a failed & catastrophic policy. Masks are ineffective. And harmful,” said a tweet that’s been read nearly 300,000 times since Sunday. “COVID came from a lab. Everything we skeptics said was true.”
Overall mentions of COVID-19 began to rise after The Wall Street Journal published a story about the Energy Department report on Sunday. Since then, mentions of various COVID-related conspiracy theories have soared, according to an analysis conducted by Zignal Labs, a San Francisco-based media intelligence firm, and shared with The Associated Press.
While the lab leak theory has bounced around the internet since the pandemic began, references to it soared 100,000% in the 48 hours after the Energy Department report was revealed, according to Zignal’s analysis, which combed through social media, blogs and other sites.
Many of the conspiracy theories contradict each other and the findings in the Energy Department report. In a tweet on Tuesday, U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Republican from Georgia, called COVID-19 a “man made bioweapon from China.” A follower quickly challenged her: “It was made in Ukraine,” he responded.
With so many questions remaining about a world event that has claimed so many lives and upended even more, it’s not at all surprising that COVID-19 is still capable of generating so much anger and misinformation, according to Bret Schafer, a senior fellow at the Alliance for Securing Democracy, a Washington-based organization that has tracked government propaganda about COVID-19.
“The pandemic was so incredibly disruptive to everyone. The intensity of feelings about COVID, I don’t think that’s going to go away,” Schafer said. “And any time something new comes along, it breathes new life into these grievances and frustrations, real or imagined.”
Chinese government officials have in the past used their social media accounts to amplify anti-U.S. conspiracy theories, including some that suggested the U.S. created the COVID-19 virus and framed its release on China.
So far, they’ve taken a quieter approach to the Energy Department report. In their official response, China’s government dismissed the agency’s assessment as an effort to politicize the pandemic. Online, Beijing’s sprawling propaganda and disinformation network was largely silent, with just a few posts criticizing or mocking the report.
“BREAKING,” a pro-China YouTuber wrote on Twitter. “I can now announce, with ‘low confidence,’ that the COVID pandemic began as a leak from Hunter Biden’s laptop.”
China on Tuesday said it has been “open and transparent” in the search for the origins of COVID-19, after questions about how the pandemic began received new attention.
Most recently, the U.S. Department of Energy assessed with “low confidence” that the pandemic that was first detected in the central Chinese city of Wuhan in late 2019 began with the leak of a virus from a lab. The report hasn’t been made public.
China had “shared the most data and research results on virus tracing and made important contributions to global virus tracing research,” Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mao Ning Mao told reporters at a daily briefing.
“Politicizing the issue of virus tracing will not smear China but will only damage the U.S.’s own credibility,” Mao said, in response to complaints from U.S. officials and members of Congress that China has not been entirely cooperative.
Her comments came amid continuing questions about how the virus that has killed more than 6.8 million people worldwide first emerged.
Others in the U.S. intelligence community disagree with the U.S. Energy Department assessment of the lab leak, citing differing opinions within the government. “There is just not an intelligence community consensus,” John Kirby, the spokesman for the National Security Council, said Monday.
The DOE conclusion was first reported over the weekend in the Wall Street Journal, which said the classified report was based on new intelligence and noted in an update to a 2021 document. The DOE oversees a national network of labs in the U.S.
White House officials on Monday declined to confirm press reports about the assessment.
In 2021, officials released an intelligence report summary that said four members of the U.S. intelligence community believed with low confidence that the virus was first transmitted from an animal to a human, and a fifth believed with moderate confidence that the first human infection was linked to a lab.
California’s coronavirus emergency officially ends Tuesday, nearly three years after Gov. Gavin Newsom issued the nation’s first statewide stay-at-home order and just days after the state reached the grim milestone of 100,000 deaths related to the virus.
As California’s emergency winds down, such declarations continue in just five other states — including Texas and Illinois — signaling an end to the expanded legal powers of governors to suspend laws in response to the once mysterious disease. President Joe Biden announced last month the federal government will end its own version May 11.
The end of California’s order will have little to no effect on most people as Newsom has already lifted most of the state’s restrictions, like those that required masks, closed beaches and forced many businesses to close. It offers a symbolic marker of the end of a period that once drastically altered the lives of the state’s nearly 40 million residents.
Illinois’ order will end in May alongside the federal order, while the governors of Rhode Island and Delaware recently extended their coronavirus emergency declarations. In New Mexico, public health officials are weighing whether to extend a COVID-19 health emergency beyond its Friday expiration date.
Texas, meanwhile, hasn’t had any major coronavirus restrictions for years, but Republican Gov. Greg Abbott keeps extending his state’s emergency declaration because it gives him the power to stop some of the states’ more liberal cities from imposing their own restrictions, like requiring masks or vaccines. Abbott has said he’ll keep the emergency order — and his expanded powers — in place until the Republican-controlled Texas Legislature passes a law to prevent local governments from imposing virus restrictions on their own.
The conflicting styles show that, while the emergencies may be ending, the political divide is not — foreshadowing years of competing narratives of the pandemic from two potential presidential candidates in Newsom and Abbott.
Newsom has used his authority to make sure all of California’s local governments had restrictions in place during the pandemic, even threatening to cut funding to some cities that refused to enforce them. While California’s emergency declaration is ending, other local emergencies will remain in place — including in Los Angeles County, home to nearly 10 million people.
The Los Angeles emergency order encourages mask use in some public places like business and trains and for residents who have been exposed to the virus. It will remain in effect for at least another month. Tuesday, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors will debate whether to end the order March 31.
Many public health experts say it makes sense that California’s order is coming to a close.
“Three years ago, if you … got infected you were rolling the dice about dying,” said Brad Pollock, chair of the Department of Public Health Sciences at the University of California, Davis. “What’s happened in the three years now is we have vaccines, we have antiviral therapy, we have much more knowledge about how we take care of patients in terms of supportive care. Your risk of dying is a fraction of what it was.”
The Newsom administration’s approach was to issue broad restrictions on what people could do and where they could go. California ended up faring better than other states, but they did worse than some other countries, like Sweden, said Jeffrey Klausner, professor of clinical population and public health sciences at the Keck School of Medicine at the University of Southern California.
“I think if we had better focused our resources on those most at risk, we probably could have avoided more deaths,” he said.
The pandemic strained California’s health care system, which has yet to fully recover, said Carmela Coyle, president and CEO of the California Hospital Association. She said hospitals remain overwhelmed — not from COVID patients, but from an influx of people returning to the health care system after staying away during the pandemic. She said a majority of California’s hospitals are losing money, prompting fears some could close — just as a community hospital in the state’s Central Valley did in December.
“While the state’s COVID public health emergency is formally concluding, the health care system emergency remains,” Coyle said.
Health care workers have felt the strain, too, working long hours among people infected with a highly contagious and potentially life-threatening disease. The strain has prompted a workforce shortage, with competing proposals to remedy it. The California Hospital Association is asking for a one-time infusion of $1.5 billion to help keep hospitals afloat. Labor unions, meanwhile, are backing a bill that would impose a $25 minimum wage for health care workers.
Meanwhile, local public health departments worry the end of the coronavirus emergency will mean a return to limited funding for their budgets, an issue exposed in the early days of the pandemic when many counties did not have enough people to respond to the crisis. Newsom signed a budget last year that will spend $200 million to help public health departments hire more workers. This year, he’s proposing cutting nearly $50 million in public health workforce training programs, part of his plan to cover a projected budget deficit.
“Public health is dependent on their frontline workforce, and that frontline workforce has to be skilled and trained and educated,” said Michelle Gibbons, president of the County Health Executives Association of California.
Overall, Newsom’s budget proposal would sustain $300 million in public health spending, including $100 million for 404 new positions in the state Department of Public Health, including areas of workforce training and emergency preparedness and response. The money will “modernize state and local public health infrastructure and transition to a resilient public health system,” said H.D. Palmer, spokesperson for the California Department of Finance.
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Associated Press journalists Christopher Weber in Los Angeles; Paul Weber in Austin, Texas; and Morgan Lee in Santa Fe, New Mexico, contributed reporting.
