The housing industry is up in arms over new tenant protections that the Biden administration administration is preparing to roll out as soon as this month, Politico reports.

The protections, which come as rents around the country are falling, could include promoting grace periods for late rents, as well as giving renters who are facing eviction the right to legal counsel, according to advocates.

According to Jerry Howard, CEO of the National Association of Home Builders, the industry is bracing for “some pretty intense regulation.”

“They need to be very cautious about what they’re doing,” he added, having attended a November White House meeting on tenant protections. “There’s a real chance of creating a problem that doesn’t exist.”

With a possible recession looming, the Biden administration will be looking for ways to provide relief to cash-strapped Americans suffering from a higher cost of living. Since the U.S. House is now under Republican control, the kind of sweeping economic legislation enacted during the last two years is off the table.

Democratic lawmakers including Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), are leaning on the administration to go big by curbing rent increases at millions of units in properties with government-backed mortgages – a long-shot move the White House is not seriously weighing, according to a person with knowledge of the discussions. -Politico

The National Apartment Association and 10 other industry groups are lobbying the White House to resist pressure to enact new federal requirements on top of existing laws – insisting in a December letter that doing so would “further exacerbate affordability challenges.”

“People can’t afford to live,” said Rep Jamaal Bowman (D-NY). “We want to push the president as far as possible to lighten the burden of rent on everyday people.”

Democrats are pushing the Biden administration to enact restrictions on rent hikes and punish landlords who they say are price gouging.

“[N]ot just principles, not just guidelines, but what can the president do through executive action to lighten the burden on people and put more money in their pockets,” Bowman told Politico in an interview.

The White House, meanwhile, appears to be in agreement – though it has yet to comment on specifics.

“We are exploring a broad set of administrative actions that further our commitment to ensuring a fair and affordable market for renters across the nation,” according to spokesperson Robyn Patterson. “We look forward to continuing to work with lawmakers to strengthen tenant protections and improve rental affordability.”

While rent is still driving up overall inflation — thanks in part to a data lag in the official inflation gauge — the national median rent has fallen for four straight months, according to the latest data from Apartment List. New lease demand plummeted in the second half of 2022, when the net demand for apartments fell into negative territory for the first time since 2009, according to an analysis by RealPage Market Analytics. -Politrico

“Complicating this process isn’t good at any time in the market cycle,” said Greg Brown, senior VP of government affairs at the National Apartment Association. “But we’re in the fourth straight month of rent declines. I think things are adjusting again, so it does raise the question, are they responding to a situation of three to four months ago, not what is currently happening or will be happening in the near future?“

By Mariah Muhammad and Laura Dyrda of Becker’s Hospital Review

Rural hospitals and healthcare facilities face amplified financial challenges amid persisting workforce shortages, rising costs and leveling reimbursement. Reserves are dwindling and without urgent action, hundreds of facilities face closure. 

But it’s not too late. Mobile health, partnerships, new payment methods and government support can make a big difference to rural hospitals across the U.S. Becker’s asked 33 healthcare executives to share their best ideas to save rural healthcare, and here they are. The executives featured in this article are all speaking at the Becker’s Healthcare CEO+CFO Roundtable on Nov. 13-16, 2023 in Chicago.

Question: What is your best idea to save rural healthcare?

President and CEO

Johnese Spisso. President of UCLA Health, CEO of UCLA Hospital System and Associate Vice Chancellor of UCLA Health Sciences: While some progress has been made in improving access to primary care in rural areas, access to specialty care remains a challenge. One of the opportunities to increase access is through the use of telemedicine and video visits with highly trained specialists who are available at academic medical centers and other large health systems. One of the ways we have expanded access at UCLA Health is through telemedicine. Additionally, through operating an interfacility transfer center, we serve as a resource to rural hospitals in our region, which rely on us to accept transfers of complex patients that have needs that exceed the level of care that can be provided in the rural facilities.

David Lubarsky, MD. CEO and Vice Chancellor of Human Health Sciences at UC Davis Health (Sacramento, Calif.): Around one in five Americans live in rural areas, but only 5 percent of physicians practice in these same areas. UC Davis has made it a priority to help close this gap in rural healthcare by incentivizing medical school graduates to practice in rural communities. We have built a number of clinical and education partnerships to both increase providers in these communities and bring in, via virtual technologies, advanced and specialty practices from regional academic medical centers.

We need new models of place-based medical provider recruitment, education and training to include far greater numbers of individuals from rural communities, as they are much more likely to ultimately practice in these communities. Our COMPADRE program is an example of a cross-state effort funded by American Medical Association, UC Davis and Oregon Health & Science University to partner with dozens of graduate medical education programs and tribal communities in Southern Oregon and Northern California to address this crisis.

Bill Gassen. President and CEO of Sanford Health (Sioux Falls, S.D.): Protecting rural health care starts with reimagining how we deliver care for the 1.5 million patients we have the privilege of serving at Sanford Health, two-thirds of whom live in rural communities. Sanford’s landmark $350 million virtual care initiative aims to expand access to convenient, high-quality care regardless of zip code, improve the patient experience, advance innovation through new research and attract and train a new generation of clinicians.   

The past few years have tested our nation’s health systems as never before. Sanford Health is committed to seeking new ways to provide more affordable, accessible and equitable care, which is why we’re excited about our proposed merger with Fairview Health Services. Together, we will strengthen care for our patients, offer expanded career growth opportunities for our employees and serve as a destination for top clinical talent. By combining our respective strengths and expertise in rural and urban health care, we will expand access to high-quality care for more people across our region, drive innovative care solutions, invest in the well-being and quality of life of our communities and ensure we can continue to deliver world-class care for all those who place their trust in us long into the future

Donna Lynne. CEO of Denver Health (Colo.): My best ideas for rural healthcare are partnering with urban hospitals, particularly safety nets, and using telehealth with those hospitals that are truly partners. Lastly, another good idea is to use some form of “gainsharing” when patients are transferred.

Brian Peters. CEO of Michigan Health Hospital Association (Okemos): I am a big believer in technology as a game-changer for the future of healthcare delivery. In particular, it can serve as a force multiplier in the realm of healthcare staffing. When combined with the significant traction gained by telehealth since the start of the pandemic, this means that technology — if thoughtfully deployed — can help to stabilize the rural health infrastructure. One imperative: we need regulatory and reimbursement policies that incentivize and support this concept.

Jeff Thompson, MD. CEO Emeritus at Gundersen Health System (La Crosse, Wis.): Although more rapidly changing the payment system away from fee-for-service will help, the best hope and most progress is to change the behavior of the large systems and universities to view rural areas not as referral pipelines but as citizens and providers that need real population healthcare partners.

Not closing, but re-focusing the work of rural providers and rural hospitals that have already been shifting to outpatient work [will help]. Systems can connect the EHR , provide quality and HR systems improvements, focus on cancer screening and mental health services as well as those other needed procedures that can be done well locally like cataracts, mammograms, and colonoscopies. Those systems that are truly partners will most likely improve referrals, but the connection is built on the value of improving health.

Robert Corona. CEO of SUNY Upstate Medical University (Syracuse, N.Y.): It will be solved by technological and process innovations. We serve one-third of the geography of New York State, so rural healthcare is key for us. We have a rural medicine training program for physicians and they need special tools. Rural healthcare is best served through use of advanced computing and communications technology, autonomous machines like drones and robots for supply logistics and other operations.

We now have established an autonomous machines division and a mobile medical unit. We have a hospital at home program and an influenza-like illness program that both use body-worn sensors on remotely located patients for vital signs and other parameters. This is all part of the distribution of healthcare services beyond bricks and mortar healthcare facilities.

Mark McPherson. President and CEO of Trinity Health At Home (Livonia, Mich.): Enact legislation to pay for telehealth in a home health nursing environment. During the pandemic, telehealth was shown to be highly effective as a way to provide care. It’s reimbursable for physicians, but not for nursing care. Reimbursing telehealth in-home care would allow home care agencies to leverage already scarce nursing resources across an unlimited geography, mitigating many of the logistical issues of providing home care in a rural environment.

Charles A. Powell, MD. CEO of Mount Sinai-National Jewish Health Respiratory Institute; Medical Director of Mount Sinai Hospital Respiratory Care Services (New York City): In the respiratory disease space, a key point of emphasis on providing access to specialty services in remote or rural regions. We are able to address potential gaps in access by leveraging technology to connect rural clinics and to connect with patients at home. For example, multidisciplinary tumor boards and multidisciplinary interstitial lung disease management programs can provide access to clinicians in practice locations that are distant from the tertiary facility hosting the discussion. We have deployed remote patient monitoring solutions to patients and home sleep study patients by direct shipping that allow us to connect with COPD patients across the continuum of care and to diagnose patients with symptoms of obstructive sleep apnea.

Helen Johnson. CEO of Sparrow Eaton Hospital (Charlotte, Mich.): The expansion of broadband internet services has helped level the playing field for rural communities. While not yet complete, in those areas where access to high-speed internet is available, those communities are leveraging this basic utility for healthcare, education and economic development.

Donald Lloyd, II. President and CEO of St. Claire Healthcare (Morehead, Ky.): In my view, we cannot perpetuate a stable rural health infrastructure until we address three significant issues critical to achieve rural health sustainability. First, we must develop and attract a rural-centric pipeline of talent to meet our clinical and workforce needs. Second, we must realize that it is not economically possible to sustain a full service acute care hospital in every rural community. Such a realization takes great political courage but also clinical creativity to meet the community’s needs. Third, CMS and state Medicaid agencies must establish payment methodologies that sustain institutions in low volume and safety-net environments

Mark Gridley. President and CEO of FHN Memorial Hospital (Freeport, Ill.): My thought is a deep focus by federal and state legislators that are truly seeking to understand the barriers to healthcare in rural communities. Many of these barriers are driven by inadequate reimbursement methodologies for noncritical access providers, which creates difficulty in staffing and, ultimately, in providing access to care that is sustainable, consistent and close to small communities. This would include innovative technological program funding in addition to stabilizing declining reimbursement amidst increasing costs.

Michael Canady, MD. CEO of Holzer Health System (Gallipolis, Ohio): The solution to saving rural healthcare lies in solving the payer mix issue. Rural HCOs have such a high percentage of Medicare/Medicaid/self-pay that it is becoming a challenging revenue issue. Closely related to this is the 20 percent initial denial rate across the board. Fix these two problems and rural healthcare can survive.

Thomas Siemers. CEO of Wilbarger General Hospital (Vernon, Texas): Collaboration and diversification are the key strategies for future success. We should look for ways we can collaborate with other organizations and providers to expand and diversify our services. Rural hospitals will have to try new strategies, start new services, adapt to the changing needs of patients. The key is to keep our patients local so they don’t have to travel for care. Rural hospitals will have to share revenue and/or pay for the services provided by other organizations/providers. But it’s worth it. We’ve got to grow.

Jeremiah Hodshire. President and CEO of Hillsdale (Mich.) Hospital Administration: Ultimately, rural healthcare suffers from the reality that we are often paid less than what it costs us to provide patient care. No other business or industry would be expected to survive under those conditions, and rural hospitals shouldn’t have to scramble to find other revenue sources like grants, cash-only services, etc., in order to be financially sustainable. Achieving health equity for rural Americans requires us to sustain rural hospitals so we can continue innovating, investing in technology, pioneering access to care initiatives and more. Payment reform is not just the best way to save rural healthcare long-term — it is the ONLY way.

Kenneth Rose. President and CEO of Texas Health Hospital Mansfield: The plight of rural healthcare in our country is one that will not be solved by hospitals and healthcare systems alone. Rural communities would be benefited by the collaboration of community services offered by other not-for-profit organizations along with hospitals. The issues in rural communities many times are more than just acute care related and have other social/societal components, which calls for more than the expertise of community hospitals. An issue as large as this brings the old saying to mind: many hands make light work.

Christopher Bjornberg, CEO of Mayers Memorial Healthcare District (Fall River Mills, Calif.): The best way to save rural healthcare is to treat it as rural healthcare. Urban health is not the same as rural health but it is mostly treated the same way. Currently, Medicare is the only payer that has a program specific for rural health that takes a critical access hospital designation while Medicaid and commercial payers like Blue Cross, UnitedHealthcare and the like generally do not. Coupled with the poor reimbursement rates, are the rising administrative costs for providing healthcare. According to an article from CNN in February 2022, “Administrative costs alone make up more than a quarter of U.S. healthcare spending.” If we want to save rural healthcare we have to change the reimbursement across all payers not just one and then ease the administrative burdens that go along with that. Just like it shouldn’t be difficult for people to obtain good quality healthcare, it should not be difficult to get paid to provide good quality healthcare.

CFO and Strategic Leaders

Marty Hutson. CFO of St. Mary’s Health Care System (Bayside, N.Y.): The first step to ‘save’ rural healthcare is to accept that the one-size-fits-none model of Medicare does not work. Rural hospitals face more difficulty in recruiting and retaining staff. Given your location, access to goods and services is also more expensive. CAH based on bed size is not effective when some facilities are too big to be considered critical access but remain just as remote and important as those with that designation.

Nate Shinagawa. COO of UCI Health (Orange County, Calif.): One of America’s strengths, compared to anywhere in the world, is our recognition that immigrants add value to the culture and success of our country. Nowhere is this more evident than in healthcare, where 25 percent of all physicians are international medical graduates. Many of these physicians came to America through the H1-B visa program, a critical pathway that’s provided talented physicians to underserved areas, including much of rural America.

For example, in places like North Dakota, H1-B applicants represent almost 5 percent of all physicians. We can turn around the healthcare access problem in rural America with progressive immigration policies. Expand H1-B visas, fast-track the green card process for physicians and nurses, expand the J-1 visa waiver program and make it easier to attain state licensures. In a year, we’d see the impact of these changes to the great benefit of rural America.

Cristen Page, MD. Executive Dean of the UNC School of Medicine (Chapel Hill, N.C.): We should address this issue with humility. Our neighbors living in rural areas need to be listened to and supported as they know best what is needed in their communities. I have dedicated much of my career to rural workforce development and creating sustainable programs that introduce future providers to the impacts that they can make and the joys that they can find in rural service. We need more providers in rural service – not just physicians, but nurses, APPs, and others. We need to support the expansion of rural residency and other training programs and to continue building strong networks so that success stories and knowledge can be shared. And we need to leverage technology to support our rural providers as well as new models of care to better serve our rural patients.

Arianne Dowdell, JD. Vice President and Chief Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Officer of Houston Methodist (Texas): Equitable access to healthcare may not just mean a brick-and-mortar location but also working closely with community partners to support people with chronic health conditions through prevention, education and access. Looking at data to learn more about the communities we serve or those we have the potential to serve and knowing more about incidence rates of certain diseases is helpful when meeting the healthcare needs of patients, particularly those in rural communities.

At Houston Methodist, we often talk about meeting people where they are and that includes supporting people with varying education levels, limited knowledge about their own healthcare, or those who have little to no access to technology. We learned a lot during the pandemic about how we can support people who may fall into these areas of their healthcare journey, and we’re continuing to use those lessons learned to create quality healthcare experiences for people despite where they live.

Nick Stefanizzi. CEO of Northwell Direct (New Hyde Park, N.Y.): ‘Saving’ rural healthcare will be predicated on solving for the unique challenges experienced by these populations – primarily, addressing access and social determinants of health, which in the context of rural health, are synergistic strategies.

To start, given that the National Rural Health Association has described that of the more than 7,200 federally designated health professional shortage areas, 3 out of 5 are in rural regions, access is a clear structural barrier. The fix here can’t just be brick and mortar facilities and providers. Rather, solving for this will require a combination of in-person and virtual treatment modalities to expand the pool of providers available for critical services. It will also require an investment in digital tools and resources that enable individuals to better engage and manage their own health. All must be highly integrated and easy to navigate if we expect widespread adoption and utilization.

Further, a population health approach to addressing the social determinants of health and the underlying factors that can adversely influence the health of populations living in rural communities will similarly help to address root causes. An individual’s zip code often has more impact on health than any other factor, and in order to raise the health of rural populations, the focus needs to expand beyond traditional medical care. Through innovative and proactive interventions, we can enable health professionals and individuals to better engage and manage chronic and other conditions that exacerbate the challenges associated with the lack of access to local care providers.

Taken together, addressing access and social determinants will go a long way in solving the rural healthcare crisis.

Kerry Mackey. Vice President of Hospital Operations, Women and Children’s Services at NYU Langone Health (New York City): Telemedicine/telehealth services can be utilized to expand access to care in rural areas. We learned this from COVID-19 when we had to extend healthcare outside the hospital’s doors/walls. Also, implementing a home hospital service can complement telehealth/telemedicine by bringing that day-to-day nursing care to the applicable patient’s home. In addition, utilizing data and outcomes to negotiate reimbursement rates for Medicare services is how we can overcome the challenge around service or provider restrictions.

Scott Polenz, CPA, MBA, FACHE. Vice President of Physician and Advanced Practice Clinician Relations of Marshfield Clinic Health System (Wis.): Saving rural healthcare is about as ambitious an undertaking as you can aspire to because of the complex, interwoven challenges that must be addressed. Fixing rural health care requires fixing our national health care system and a societal-level shift with regard to how we view health and health care. On a national level, we have to commit to the systemic changes required to truly move to a value-based system. On a more rural-specific level, we need massive investments to upgrade our overall public health infrastructure. Rural communities lag behind metropolitan counterparts in areas like access to transportation, availability of internet, distance from sites of care, access to healthy food and many other community-based resources. This basic infrastructure is fundamental to accessing quality health care, and it is going to take systemic, sustained investment to equip rural health care with the tools we need.

Chad Dilley. COO of IU Health Saxony (Fishers, Ind.): IU Health is proud to serve many rural Indiana communities in places like Tipton, Bedford and Frankfort. There are really two inherent challenges: the geography of small populations spread over large areas, and provider recruitment to live and work away from urban centers and the specialty and subspecialty support that affords. We are continuing to lean into virtual care, virtual consults and telehealth to make care more accessible for patients close to home (or at home), and support our teams with the expertise and collaboration they need to provide excellent care in rural settings.

Kira Carter-Robertson. Senior Vice President of Regional Hospitals at Sparrow Health System (Lansing, Mich.): I would love to say there is a magic bullet to save rural healthcare, but I don’t think the answer is one-size-fits-all. While rural hospitals may face similar pressures, rural communities are not all the same. In the short-term, rural healthcare providers will have to continue blocking, tackling, and juggling service needs with volume, managing staffing and provider challenges, assessing the right operation models, and exploring partnerships and mergers. Finances are the key driver behind closures and financial challenges for rural hospitals, so the long-term answer is a drastic payment overhaul. In the meantime, the secret sauce for rural healthcare is more complex and several levers will need to be pulled both regulatory and operationally to sustain the future of rural healthcare.

Rashid Syed. Managing Partner of North Houston Surgical Hospitals: In my opinion, the best approach towards improving rural healthcare is to segregate the patient care services from one large hospital system to nimbler healthcare facilities, making it more approachable and personable for both, the patients and the providers, by creating urgent care centers, surgery centers, specialty microhospitals for mild to moderate complexity elective and nonelective treatments and keeping larger hospitals for higher complexity, longer complicated treatments. It’s about taking healthcare to the patients rather than patients in need seeking healthcare.

Clinical Leaders

Andy Anderson, MD. Chief Medical and Quality Officer of RWJBarnabas Health (West Orange, N.J.): Rural healthcare is essential to address the health and healthcare needs of patients and families who live in rural communities. My best idea to save rural healthcare is to provide robust virtual access (through telemedicine and remote patient monitoring devices) to triage and address acute care needs, to better manage chronic conditions, and to provide access to the best specialists to diagnose and treat complex medical conditions.

William Morice, MD, PhD. President of Mayo Clinic Laboratories and Chair of the Department of Laboratory Medicine & Pathology at Mayo Clinic (Rochester, Minn.): From my perspective, to save rural healthcare, one must tackle one of the greatest challenges facing rural hospitals and healthcare providers, which is maintaining sufficient patient volumes in their facilities while also developing next-generation tools and capabilities. These tools and capabilities, such as at-home testing and digital diagnostics, will allow them to reach their patients in their homes spread across large areas. So, my idea is to invest in rural healthcare’s ability to interact with patients remotely while also designing practice and social service models that bring them into facilities for care when needed. Done correctly, this will enable rural healthcare to sustain and grow their services while also increasing their reach and convenience for patients.

Phil Schaefer. Senior Vice President, Ambulatory Services and Chief Care Network Development Officer of Southern Illinois Healthcare (Carbondale): For rural hospitals to survive, the economics of reimbursement must change along with the hospitals’ approach to their cost structures. With almost all major payers having record profits last year and with declining utilization and reimbursement, the current model of paying hospitals is not sustainable. Given this, it’s imperative for rural hospitals to reevaluate their service portfolio and bend their cost curve downward.

Steve Lipshultz, MD. Goodyear Professor and Chair, Department of Pediatrics of University at Buffalo Jacobs School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences (Buffalo, N.Y.); Pediatric Chief-of-Service of Kaleida Health (Buffalo, N.Y.); President of UBMD Pediatrics (Buffalo, N.Y.): Improving rural healthcare finances is one of several key elements to sustaining rural healthcare and coming closer to a single standard of US healthcare. Below I list 14 areas where opportunities exist and are needed. Utilizing technology such as:

1. Telehealth;

2. EMRs;

3. 3. ub-and-spoke health system networking and infrastructures to allow most care in the local community but having the backup;

4. Ongoing physician and other healthcare provider and staff training;

5. Recruitment;

6. Retention, addressing;

7. Workforce shortages with pipeline programs and others;

8. QA/QI oversight and feedback as drivers of decisions based on the quality of care in rural places;

9. Enhanced rural public health;

10. Focused patient management on unique needs in rural settings;

11. Other necessary infrastructures to increase both revenues from payments and reimbursements and other efficiencies and outcomes are key;

12. The transition to value-based care will be very sensitive for rural healthcare with reduced reserves and with unique needs and solutions.;

13. Having a national agenda to reduce disparities by states for funders of rural healthcare around the U.S. will help level the playing field. The differences in reimbursements and uncompensated care for the same services around the U.S. widely vary based on local rules and regulations and (both state and federal) often cause essential services in rural communities to no longer be sustained.; and

14. Adequate payments and better payment systems are needed with a level playing field.

Anuj Vohra, DO. Chairman and Medical Director of the Department of Emergency Medicine of Charlotte Hungerford Hospital (Torrington, Conn.): My best idea to save rural healthcare is advancing access to care by means of telemedicine, home visits and increasing preventative care.

Charles Emerman, MD. Chair, Emergency Medicine and Medical Director, Service Line of MetroHealth Medical Center (Cleveland, Ohio): Smaller rural hospitals would do well to form more robust clinical programs that leverage the resources of the larger urban hospitals. For example, we have trauma surgeons who take calls at two smaller rural hospitals. The local surgeons are happy not to take overnight ED calls. The trauma surgeons operate locally when appropriate and then transfer the more complex patients. It works out well for the patients, the local medical staff, and both systems.

Andy Anderson, MD. Chief Medical and Quality Officer of RWJBarnabas Health Medical Group (West Orange, N.J.): Rural healthcare is essential to address the health and healthcare needs of patients and families who live in rural communities. My best idea to save rural healthcare is to provide robust virtual access (through telemedicine and remote patient monitoring devices) to triage and address acute care needs, manage chronic conditions better, and provide access to the best specialists to diagnose and treat complex medical conditions.

Nisha Mehta, MD. Founder of Physician Side Gigs: Maintaining the quality of care in rural areas will become increasingly challenging as healthcare personnel shortages continue to amplify. Employers will need to place a real focus on retention and recruitment of clinicians, and systemically, threats to compensation by CMS and other payers need to be addressed. Medicare cuts are short sighted and will only exacerbate existing issues with access to care.

Tesla, Inc. plans to report fourth-quarter results after the market close on Wednesday. Investors seek updates on the 2023 demand outlook after the EV company slashed prices on its cars worldwide. 

The automaker realized it’s not only EV game in the ‘carbon-free’ town, as US, Europe, and Japanese car companies are ramping up EV production. Tesla slashed Model 3 and Model Y prices by up 20% in hopes of stoking demand as the entire EV market becomes saturated but also slows.

WSJ spoke with Stanly Tran, a 32yo California psychotherapist, who was on the waiting list to purchase a Ford Mustang Mach-E electric SUV but quickly canceled his reservation and bought a Model Y after hearing about the price cut. 

“‘There’s no way,'” Tran said when he heard about the price cut, adding the Model Y offered more range and a competitive price to the Mach-E. 

Tesla’s move to squeeze competitors by sacrificing some of its strong operating-profit margins is a desperate attempt to increase sales but also roiled the secondary market for used Teslas. 

Meanwhile, dealers who sell Teslas from their used-car inventory say valuations on some models fell by several thousand dollars following this month’s price cut. In the first 17 days of January, prices of 2020 model year or newer used Teslas were down about 25% from their peak in June of last year, about double the rate of the industrywide drop during that same period, according to Edmunds. –WSJ

One example of the price cut was the Model Y, now priced at $53,000, down from about $66,000. And if buyers qualify for the federal tax credit, they can loop off another $7,500. 

Bank of America analyst John Murphy said, unlike Tesla, traditional automakers have very thin profit margins or lose money on their EV lineups. He said such a move to reduce prices could spark a price war.  

“These price cuts are likely to make the business even more difficult, just as they are attempting to ramp production of EV offerings,” Murphy said.

The lingering question is if the Elon Musk-led carmaker stoked demand. WSJ has some data on that:

The number of car shoppers researching Tesla surged following the early January price cut, research site Edmunds said. The Model Y was the second-most-researched vehicle on Edmunds’ website for the week ended Jan. 15, up from 70th the week prior. The Model 3 moved up 36 spots.

Soon after the price cut, applications for financing of Tesla vehicles tripled at Tenet, a New York startup firm that provides financing to EV buyers. The influx of customers has remained elevated, Tenet Chief Executive Alex Liegl said.

One consequence of the price cut is that it might spark an EV price war with Detroit. Then there’s the issue of angry car dealers and owners who saw their Teslas drop in price overnight. Such a move is a sign of desperation by Tesla. 

Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

U.S. health officials who spread inflated COVID-19 child death data in public meetings apologized to the source of the false data but not to the public, newly obtained emails show.

Drs. Katherine Fleming-Dutra and Sara Oliver, with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), offered the false data in 2022 while U.S. officials weighed granting emergency authorization to COVID-19 vaccines for children as young as 6 months.

The study they cited for the data was published ahead of peer review by a group comprised primarily of British authors. The study was corrected after the public meetings.

Emails obtained by The Epoch Times showed that Fleming-Dutra and Oliver were alerted that they had spread misinformation. Neither the officials nor the CDC have informed the public of the false information. Newly obtained emails showed the officials apologized to Seth Flaxman, one of the study’s authors, and even offered to see whether the study could be published in the CDC’s quasi-journal.

“I feel … that we owe you an apology,” Oliver wrote to Flaxman on June 27, about 10 days after she and Fleming-Dutra falsely said there had been at least 1,433 deaths primarily attributed to COVID-19 in America among those 19 and younger. “We draw the attention of a variety of individuals with the ACIP meetings, and apologize that you got caught in it this time.”

“I am also sorry that you got pulled into the attention around the VRBPAC and ACIP meetings,” Fleming-Dutra added. She had presented the data to the Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee, which advises the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, and the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, which advises the CDC.

Fleming-Dutra, Oliver, and Flaxman did not respond to requests for comment.

Inflated Death Toll

Using data from the CDC, Flaxman and his co-authors claimed that there were at least 1,433 deaths primarily attributed to COVID-19 among those aged 0 to 19 in the United States. The actual number was 1,088, the authors acknowledged in the corrected version of the study.

Fleming-Dutra presented the false data as rankings to VRBPAC on June 14, 2022 and ACIP three days later. It’s not clear why the CDC didn’t examine its own database rather than relying on a preprint study.

Oliver also cited the study while speaking during the ACIP meeting.

The data had an impact. It showed “that this is not a minor illness in children,” Dr. Katherine Poehling, one of the ACIP members, said at the time.

Dr. Rochelle Walensky, the CDC’s director, later appeared to cite the inflated death toll and ACIP still cites the preprint, though it was later updated with the correct data.

Flaxman updated the study after receiving an email from Kelley Krohnert, a Georgia resident who has become a fact-checker of suspect COVID-19-related claims.

Krohnert’s concerns also made their way to Fleming-Dutra and Oliver, but the CDC officials have never publicly acknowledged promoting misinformation.

‘We Had an Error’

Flaxman acknowledged in emails to Krohnert, and in a June 27 message to Fleming-Dutra and Oliver, that he did not fully understand how the CDC’s death database works.

“Thanks for your work, and your great presentations to VRBPAC and ACIP. You cited our preprint. We’ve just updated it (see attached; it should appear on medrxiv in the next day). While none of the substantive conclusions change, we had an error which you may have seen was picked up very prominently by a blogger,” Flaxman wrote. “I am writing first to say sorry–I really regret that this happened. It was my mistake in misunderstanding the [death certificate] data, and not realizing about CDC Wonder’s provisional database.”

Flaxman also asked for feedback on the updated study and whether the officials could help with submitting the paper to the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR), a quasi-journal the CDC publishes that only includes articles (pdf) vetted and shaped by top CDC officials to align with the agency’s policies.

“We’ve never tried to publish there, so I don’t know the process or how often they consider manuscripts from non-CDC authors,” Flaxman said. “If you do think this would be a possible route, perhaps one or both of you would want to help us revise the manuscript and join as an author?”

Oliver wrote back first, saying that she wanted to apologize to Flaxman and that “we will absolutely review and provide feedback,” as well as context.

“We are more than happy to do that without formally being co-authors. That way you can avoid formal CDC clearance,” Oliver wrote.

Fleming-Dutra then chimed in with her apology, adding, “I am glad to hear that you and your team are continuing to do this important work.” She recommended Flaxman and his team review studies published in the MMWR to get a sense of the format of the digest. A large portion of her email was redacted under an exemption to the Freedom of Information Act for “inter-agency or intra-agency records.” The Epoch Times has appealed that and other redactions.

Flaxman then notified the CDC officials that the corrected study had been made public. Fleming-Dutra replied, but the email was redacted.

“Thanks, very useful feedback. Small update: we’re hoping to submit to JAMA Pediatrics in the next week or so, and [redacted],” Flaxman answered. He indicated that the CDC had provided feedback and questioned on how to cite it in the submission.

Read more here…

A new study released this week by the D.C.-based Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) has concluded that America’s defense industry is “not adequately prepared” for “a protracted conventional war” with an enemy with a large military like China.

The findings were the result of a war games simulation which also relied heavily on observations and statistics being gained from the Ukraine-Russia war, and Washington’s ongoing military support role to Kiev.

Information from the Ukraine war led CSIS to find that the US would rapidly deplete its munitions, particularly long-range, precision-guided ones – in merely less than a week of a hot war with China in the Taiwan Strait.

“The main problem is that the U.S. defense industrial base — including the munitions industrial base — is not currently equipped to support a protracted conventional war,” the study emphasized.

“The bottom line is the defense industrial base, in my judgment, is not prepared for the security environment that now exists,” CSIS’s Seth Jones concluded in a statement to The Wall Street Journal.

As the study’s main author, Jones posed the question: “How do you effectively deter if you don’t have sufficient stockpiles of the kinds of munitions you’re going to need for a China-Taiwan Strait kind of scenario?” According to more from the study:

“As the war in Ukraine illustrates, a war between major powers is likely to be a protracted, industrial-style conflict that needs a robust defense industry able to produce enough munitions and other weapons systems for a protracted war if deterrence fails…”

“Given the lead time for industrial production, it would likely be too late for the defense industry to ramp up production if a war were to occur without major changes.”

The report additionally pointed out that the slow-moving nature of US bureaucracy and oversight is also a fundamental aspect to the problem:

The study also said that the U.S.’s foreign military sales (FMS) take too long because they need to be initiated by the Department of State and then executed by the Department of Defense and ultimately approved by Congress. Foreign sales have benefits, including supporting the U.S. defense industry, strengthening ally relations and preventing the sale of adversary systems to other countries, the study said.

“The U.S. FMS system is not optimal for today’s competitive environment — an environment where such countries as China are building significant military capabilities and increasingly looking to sell them overseas,” the study stated.

It does seem the Pentagon is taking note, and is aware that events in Ukraine have exposed US defense shortcomings, as the Biden administration chooses to get more and more involved. The New York Times reported Tuesday that the US plans to boost production of artillery ammunition by 500% over the next two years.

Whereas the US Army previously produced 14,400 155mm shells a month, the new plans could see those numbers hit over 90,000 each month.

Authored by Julie Kelly via AmGreatness.com,

A New Jersey man will be sentenced on Friday for his participation in the events of January 6, 2021. Julian Khater, 33, faces up to eight years in prison for allegedly using pepper spray against three police officers, including the late Brian Sicknick, that afternoon.

Khater and his friend, George Tanios, were arrested in March 2021 in connection with the alleged assault. After spending more than 18 months in a fetid D.C. jail under pretrial detention orders – Judge Thomas Hogan repeatedly denied attempts by his family to post bail – Khater pleaded guilty to assaulting police officers with a dangerous weapon.

(Tanios rejected numerous plea offers on the same charges; prosecutors finally dropped the assault counts, and he pleaded guilty to two misdemeanors.)

The Justice Department’s case was flimsy from the start, which I explained shortly after the pair’s arrest. Khater and Tanios are nothing more than human props to sustain arguably the biggest falsehood related to January 6—that Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick was killed in the line of duty. Even though a coroner concluded Sicknick died of two strokes caused by a blood clot near his brain, his death is still shamefully exploited by everyone from Joe Biden to congressional Democrats and even Sicknick’s own loved ones.

Capitol police announced Sicknick’s passing on January 7, 2021, with claims he was “injured while physically engaging with protesters.” Donald Trump and his supporters were immediately branded as cop killers.

The story, however, kept changing. First, the New York Times reported Sicknick had been bludgeoned to death by a fire extinguisher. After the paper retracted that story in February 2021, the media, no doubt prompted by the Justice Department, suggested Sicknick died of an allergic reaction to chemical spray.

In an attempt to salvage the credibility of its first bogus account, the Times published another lengthy report in March 2021 with cherry-picked clips and screenshots designed to reenact the assault.

“New videos obtained by The New York Times show publicly for the first time how the U.S. Capitol Police officer who died after facing off with rioters on Jan. 6 was attacked with chemical spray.” 

But body camera footage from a D.C. Metropolitan police officer on duty that day raises serious doubts about the government’s claims and the Times’ face-saving story about what happened to Sicknick.

In fact, the video shows how police, not protesters, gassed their fellow officers with chemical spray. Stricken officers, including Sicknick, appear to seek aid and shelter from the toxic gas, causing the collapse of a security line on the west side of the building.

This six-minute clip from Officer Daniel Thau’s body camera shows the accidental discharge of a 40-millimeter canister of a chemical irritant around 2:25 p.m. on January 6. Thau ordered Officer Richard Khoury to aim a launcher with the canister at protesters assembled on scaffolding erected for Biden’s inauguration.

“Fire it up in the air,” Thau instructed Khoury. “Just fucking shoot.”

But Khoury misfired. “What the fuck?” he asked.

A large cloud of chemical powder fell short of the scaffolding and instead enveloped a crowd of officers standing on the northern end of the west side of the Capitol. Officers coughed and gasped for air; some were bent over in pain. 

The gas cloud quickly traveled southward to where Sicknick was stationed, propelled by a brisk 18-mile-per-hour wind out of the north in Washington on January 6.

Prosecutors claim Khater sprayed Sicknick at around 2:23 p.m., but the evidence, just like everything in the January 6 saga, is dubious at best. Darren Beattie at Revolver News carefully disassembled both the Times’ reporting and the government’s evidence.

“[From] the moment Khater raises a spray canister onward, there is not a single moment in which Khater appears in the same video frame as Officer Sicknick,” Beattie wrote in March 2021. 

That’s because, according to a separate choppy video released by the government in April 2021, Sicknick left that area and headed north—presumably walking straight into the drifting chemical cloud produced by Khoury’s launcher.

Sicknick is then photographed bent over near inaugural scaffolding, the same area where officers quickly advanced up a set of stairs to seek fresh air on the upper west terrace after Khoury’s misfire.

It just happened to be the exact location where Sicknick is also seen on surveillance video recovering from the effects of chemical spray and rinsing his eyes with bottled water about two minutes after Khoury’s misfire.

The Times’ March 2021 also suggested Khater’s “attack” on law enforcement caused many officers to abandon the secure perimeter.

“The attack on Officer Sicknick and his colleagues comes at a key moment. Within five minutes, the police line collapses, officers retreat into the Capitol and rioters gain control over the west side of the building.”

Except that’s not accurate.

Testimony by a top Capitol Police official this month confirmed it was the misfire by Officer Khoury that led to the collapse of the police line, which at the time was successfully keeping the crowd away from the building:

Defense Attorney Bradford Geyer: As we play this, if you can try to pay attention to the smoke, whether it’s just smoke or whether it’s [tear] gas, and the reactions of the officers. Okay?

Mendoza: OK.

(Video played.)

Geyer: Does it seem to you there’s some kind of retreat by the officers along the line in this video?

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Mendoza: Yes.

Geyer: So could this be a reason why right around this time you had to confront protestors coming into the crypt and coming into that first floor, because there was a strategic retreat, the lines gave way, and the crowd just walked forward with provocateurs.

Mendoza: I can’t say why that specific crowd was where they were at the time they were there.

Mendoza also confirmed that police used “a lot of munitions that day.” Thau’s full video shows his arrival at the west side of the Capitol shortly after 1:00 p.m., more than an hour before the building was breached on the other side. Officers are seen coughing and rubbing their eyes after being hit with tear gas deployed by law enforcement.

At around 1:50 p.m., Thau ordered another officer to “drop one in there” against the nonviolent crowd.

He then warned his colleagues to protect themselves.

“Wind, wind!” he shouted, referring to high wind conditions.

As Thau tended to the injured, one officer screamed at him: “Stop doing the goddamn pepper spray!”

Even giving the government the benefit of the doubt—that Khater attacked Sicknick a minute or so before Khoury’s misfire—it’s clear the individuals responsible for discharging copious amounts of dangerous chemicals into the air on January 6 were police officers. (Khater is seen on open source video at 2:14 p.m. complaining that “they just sprayed me,” referring to police. And body camera footage from the D.C. Metro police officers who recorded the alleged attack remains under protective seal.)

The notion that a palm-sized container of pepper spray could disable three officers standing several feet away is simply not believable. Officer Caroline Edwards, one of the three officers Khater is accused of attacking, told the January 6 select committee that the spray she encountered was much stronger than what she endured during training. “I remember it hurting a lot more, which is saying something because the academy’s—our pepper spray is—well, it’s actually Sabre Red. It’s no joke. It literally feels like someone punched—just punched like two holes in your eye sockets. This felt like—it was just pain unimaginable.”

That wasn’t produced by anything allegedly sprayed by Trump supporters. Potent gas that caused dozens of officers to struggle to breathe, see, or stand—some reportedly vomited—was used needlessly by law enforcement itself against a crowd obeying police commands and respecting barriers at the time.

How many of the 140 or so officers reportedly injured on January 6 were hurt by the actions of their own colleagues?

Of course, these facts have surfaced too late to save Julian Khater, who will face the vengeful wrath of federal prosecutors and an octogenarian judge, all of whom consider January 6 an act of domestic terror. The New York Times will again escape accountability for publishing another flawed story about what happened to Brian Sicknick.

And the false narrative about Sicknick’s death will remain intact and leveraged for political purposes, evidence be damned—a recurring theme when it comes to anything about the events of January 6.

*  *  *

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Two weeks after the state of Texas filed a lawsuit to stop the Biden administration from ignoring a federal immigration law that prevents illegal immigrants from residing in the US if they’re likely to rely on taxpayer-funded programs, a group of 20 Republican-led states, spearheaded once again by Texas AG Ken Paxton – have sued the administration again.

This time, the 20 states and America First Legal, have claimed in the suit that the Department of Homeland Security effectively created a visa program without congressional approval by “announcing that it will permit up to 360,000 aliens annually from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela to be ‘paroled’ into the United States for two years or longer and with eligibility for employment authorization.”

The lawsuit claims that DHS exceeded congressional limits on parole authority – and that the agency can only issue parole on a case-by-case basis. Moreover, the agency did not have the authority to authorize the program, and ignored the mandatory notice-and-comment rulemaking requirement detailed in the Administrative Procedure Act, Just the News reports.

Since President Joe Biden took office, more than 4 million illegal migrants have entered the United States, with a record 2.4 million doing so in fiscal year 2022 alone. The crisis shows no sign of abating, with roughly 216,000 migrants crossing the border in December 2022, an 11% increase over the November totals.

That surge was largely driven by an influx of Cuban and Nicaraguan migrants, which the Biden administration took to indicate that its parole program for Venezuelans was succeeding, given the decline of migrants from that country. Migrants from Cuba, Nicaragua and Haiti would benefit from the expanded parole process. -JTN

When the program was originally announced, President Biden claimed that the aim was to limit the number of uninvited arrivals on the southern border because migrants would be encouraged to obtain pre-approval for entry while still in their home country.

“We anticipate this action is going to substantially reduce the number of people attempting to cross our southwest border without going through a legal process,” said Biden.

Read the complaint below:

GOP state lawsuit on humani… by Adam Shaw

Authored by Tom Ozimek via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

Former socialite and convicted sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell told Britain’s Talk TV in a jailhouse interview that she believes her former associate and disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein was murdered.

Epstein, who was facing multiple charges of sex trafficking of minors, was found dead in his cell at the Metropolitan Correctional Center (MCC) in New York City in August 2019.

His death was officially ruled as a suicide by hanging, but there has been widespread speculation about the cause. For instance, a forensic pathologist hired by Epstein’s brother said multiple fractures found in his neck were “very unusual in suicidal hangings” and more consistent with strangulation.

Maxwell, who is currently serving a 20-year sentence in a Florida prison for helping Epstein sexually abuse girls, told Talk TV that she believes Epstein’s death was no suicide.

“I believe that he was murdered,” Maxwell said in the Talk TV interview. “I was shocked. Then I wondered how it had happened because as far as I was concerned, he was going to … I was sure he was going to appeal.”

Many people have united in skepticism that Epstein could have taken his own life a mere month after being arrested on sex trafficking charges.

In particular, a number of people have pointed to Epstein’s connections to powerful individuals, some of whom may have been implicated in illicit activities with him and would have wanted to keep him quiet.

Maxwell said earlier that one of her fellow inmates was offered money to murder her and schemed to “strangle her in her sleep,” according to court papers filed last year by her lawyers ahead of her sentencing.

“This incident reflects the brutal reality that there are numerous prison inmates who would not hesitate to kill Ms. Maxwell—whether for money, fame, or simple ‘street cred,’” the lawyers wrote in the filing, suggesting someone may have wanted Maxwell dead badly enough to pay for it.

Maxwell was sentenced on June 28, 2022, to 20 years in prison for conspiring with Epstein to sexually abuse minors.

She is serving time at Florida’s low-security FCI Tallahassee prison.

Questions Unanswered

Questions have swirled about the circumstances surrounding Epstein’s death since he was found dead on Aug. 10, 2019, in his cell with a bedsheet around his neck.

Epstein’s death sparked outrage that such a high-profile prisoner could have gone unmonitored at a facility where such infamous inmates like Mexican drug lord Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman and Wall Street swindler Bernie Madoff came and went without incident.

Epstein had been placed on suicide watch about a month before his death after he was found on his cell floor on July 23 with bruises on his neck. He was later taken off suicide watch and placed in a high-security housing unit where he was less closely monitored but still supposed to be checked on every half hour.

Two jail guards who were supposed to monitor Epstein were accused by prosecutors of falling asleep and surfing the internet that night rather than checking on him every 30 minutes.

The pair, Tova Noel and Michael Thomas, would later admit they “willfully and knowingly” falsified records to make it seem they were following the correct check-in protocols with regard to Epstein.

In January 2022, the criminal case against Noel and Thomas was dropped after they complied with the six-month deferred prosecution agreements they agreed to earlier, which included 100 hours of community service and cooperating with a Justice Department (DOJ) probe into Epstein’s death.

Medical Examiner: ‘The Cause Is Hanging’

Chief Medical Examiner Dr. Barbara Sampson ruled Epstein’s death a suicide by hanging. She said she made the determination “after careful review of all investigative information, including complete autopsy findings.”

Not long after Sampson ruled Epstein’s death a suicide, Epstein’s brother hired forensic pathologist Dr. Michael Baden, who was in the room for Epstein’s autopsy, to review the evidence.

Baden, who was New York City’s chief medical examiner in the 1970s, said at the time that the evidence suggested Epstein may have been murdered. He said that Epstein’s injuries were more consistent with those found in homicide victims and that he hadn’t seen the type of neck bone injuries that Epstein had in any suicides that he had investigated. Baden added, however, that his observations were not conclusive.

Some experts have said that, while uncommon, injuries to the hyoid bone that Epstein had do sometimes occur in suicidal hangings, more so in older people. Epstein was 66 at the time of his death.

After Baden issued his opinion, Sampson responded by saying that no conclusions should be drawn from a single piece of evidence or unusual injury.

“I stand firmly behind our determination of the cause and manner of death for Mr. Epstein,” she said in October 2019. “The cause is hanging, the manner is suicide.”

‘Serious Irregularities’

Then-Attorney General William Barr said at the time that there were “serious irregularities” at the Manhattan jail where Epstein died, vowing that the DOJ’s inspector general would “get to the bottom of what happened” and that there “will be accountability.” That investigation continues and no report has been released yet.

Following Barr’s remarks, then-House Judiciary Committee Chairman Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.) and then-ranking member Rep. Doug Collins (R-Ga.) sent a letter to the Bureau of Prisons asking 23 questions about Epstein’s death. In the letter, they cited deficiencies in inmate protocol and requested information about the Bureau of Prisons’ suicide prevention policies, resources, and staffing.

A subsequent report (pdf) prepared by the Bureau of Prisons National Suicide Prevention Coordinator, Psychology Services Branch, Central Office, put forward a timeline of events and circumstances leading up to Epstein’s death.

The report stated that a facilities assistant described Epstein as “distraught, sad, and a little confused” when he arrived at the correctional facility on July 6, 2019.

The assistant was cited in the report as saying that, even though Epstein said he felt fine, she wasn’t convinced and wrote that he seemed “dazed and withdrawn” and advised in an email that someone from Psychology should talk to him to “just be on the safe side and prevent any suicidal thoughts.”

Following a court proceeding on July 8, Epstein denied having any suicidal thoughts but due to risk factors was put on psychological observation, a protocol that is less restrictive than suicide watch. The report says he was taken off psychological observation several days later.

Read more here…

The Kremlin has weighed in on The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moving the Doomsday Clock closer to midnight. As we reported earlier, the body of scientists and intellectuals which have maintained the clock since 1947 on Tuesday moved it to 90 seconds till midnight, which is the closest it’s been in history. It seeks to gauge how close the world stands to nuclear war and total annihilation. 

The Bulletin explained that the clock moving closer is mostly due to escalation among world powers in Ukraine. The Russian government on Wednesday called it “really alarming” – with Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov confirming that de-escalation does not at all seem to be on the horizon, and that the question of ceasefire talks is a thing of the past.

“On the whole, the situation is really alarming,” Peskov said, explaining that at this point nations must be “particularly attentive, vigilant and responsive” – and willing to take appropriate measures to reduce risk of nuclear war.

The Tuesday change put the clock closer by 10 seconds compared to the year before.  As The Hill reviews: “The previous record of 100 seconds to midnight was set in 2020. In the clock’s history, midnight has been as far as 17 minutes away, which happened in 1991 at the end of the Cold War.”

“Midnight has typically been close to 10 or more minutes away throughout much of the clock’s history, even during the Cold War, but it has been no more than a few minutes away in modern times.”

The bipartisan DC consensus in favor of Biden’s war escalation in Ukraine blissfully marches on, as usual, despite graver warnings of escalation. The more escalation there is, the less debate.

The key question remains: how are the lives of Americans improved from this war?👇 https://t.co/Ll27tIsogh

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) January 25, 2023

With the US and Germany on Wednesday confirming that they are sending heavy battle tanks in a fresh major escalation which a mere months ago had not been a realistic consideration, journalist Glenn Greenwald has pointed out that we are in a situation of “more escalation” and “less debate”.

He poses the question of the US public broadly – “The key question remains: how are the lives of Americans improved from this war?”

Authored by Katabella Roberts via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Jason Smith (R-Mo.) is calling for an investigation into the “historic theft of taxpayer dollars from COVID-era unemployment programs” after a report by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) found that as much as $60 billion may have been spent on fraudulent claims for unemployment insurance during the pandemic.

The report, released on Jan. 23, said that the Department of Labor (DOL) stated that about $878 billion in total unemployment benefits were paid from April 2020 through September 2022.

GAO said that at least $4.3 billion in unemployment insurance (UI) fraud has been formally confirmed by state workforce agencies, while at least $45 billion in payments have been flagged for potential fraud by the DOL’s Office of Inspector General.

The federal government started an unemployment aid program in March 2020. GAO added that it’s difficult to know for sure the extent of fraud in unemployment insurance programs across the system during the pandemic.

For example, it noted that the Labor Department, based on states’ reviews of samples of claims, estimates that as much as $8.5 billion was spent on fraudulent UI claims in 2021.

According to GAO, if that level were to be extrapolated to total spending across all UI programs during the wider pandemic period, it would suggest more than $60 billion in fraudulent payments were made.

‘Hard-Earned Tax Dollars Lost to Criminal Activity, Fraud’

The report notes, however, that the figure is an estimate, subject to limitations regarding its validity and accuracy, and should be “interpreted with caution” while the actual amount is unclear.

In a statement on Monday, Smith said that the GAO report “only scratches the surface of what is publicly known about the unprecedented scope, size, and severity of the fraud.”

“This report proves what Republicans have already been saying. American families, whose wages have eroded under President [Joe] Biden’s inflation crisis, have watched as hundreds of billions of their hard-earned tax dollars were lost to criminal activity and fraud because Democrats refused to acknowledge the problem and repeatedly rejected Republican efforts to put basic safeguards in place to protect against this activity,” Smith said.

“Congressional Democrats walked away from their oversight responsibilities of getting to the bottom of how this happened, what they could do to prevent it, and even how much has fully been lost, leaving criminals to profit off the backs of taxpayers. Republicans are committed to investigating fraud and conducting rigorous oversight on behalf of working families,” he added.

The Missouri lawmaker also pointed to testimony (pdf) by DOL Inspector General Larry D. Turner in March last year stating that at least $163 billion in pandemic UI benefits could have been “paid improperly, with a significant portion attributable to fraud.”

According to The Washington Post, the government has so far recovered just over $4 billion of that, which amounts to just 2.4 percent of the wrongful payments.

Actual Unemployment Fraud Figure Could Be Much Higher

Smith also pointed to estimates by experts including Blake Hall, CEO of ID.me, who told Axios in 2021 that as much as $400 billion went on fraudulent unemployment claims. Half of all unemployment spending may have been stolen, Hall told the publication.

A statement issued in September 2022 by the DOL inspector general said that more than 190,000 investigations relating to UI fraud have been opened since the start of the pandemic, but so far just over 1,000 individuals have been charged.

While GAO noted in its report that the DOL has taken steps to address fraudulent jobless benefits, such as issuing guidance, providing funding to states, and deploying teams to recommend improvements to state unemployment insurance programs, the watchdog noted that as of December 2022, the department has “not yet developed an antifraud strategy based on leading practices in GAO’s Fraud Risk Framework.”

Read more here…