Gov. Newsom buried EDD ‘strike team’ report. Can he fix California’s unemployment mess?

Politicians typically dump bad news on late nights and weekends. The basic idea: People pay less attention to news during the weekend, making it the best time to announce embarrassing or unflattering details.

This makes Gov. Gavin Newsom’s decision to release his administration’s report on problems at the state’s Employment Development Department at 8:52 p.m. on Saturday seem like a deliberate ploy to bury bad news. The Newsom administration released the highly-anticipated report late Saturday night as the nation reeled from the news of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death.

Newsom’s aides say the late weekend drop proves they’re working hard to fix the EDD fiasco.

“In order to maximize the number of people who are paid on a timely basis and minimize increases to the backlog, we wanted to initiate the reset as quickly as possible,” said Crystal Page, a spokesperson for EDD, in a statement. “The unemployment insurance program operates on a weekly basis that stretches from Sunday to Saturdays, and initiating the two week reset on Saturday night was the least disruptive to claimants.”

We don’t buy it. There’s no reason why the Newsom administration needed to both reset the system and dump the report on Saturday night.

“Name a task force to look into gov’t ineptitude and then make sure the task force ineptly releases said report on ineptitude,” tweeted Rob Stutzman, who advised former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger on communications. “This did not meet the moment. We can attest it is a cohort of ineptitude. Full stop.”

This seems like a generous assessment. “Ineptitude” suggests the Newsom team acted out of incompetence. To us, it looks more like an effort to duck transparency.

The crisis at the EDD has been one of the Newsom administration’s most vexing disasters. As millions of unemployed Californians have sought to apply for benefits, many have been met with busy phone lines and nightmarish bureaucracy. Some have waited weeks or months to get through to a human being, all the while wondering how they’ll pay their bills.

Besieged by widespread outrage, Newsom announced the formation of a “strike team” charged with investigating the EDD’s failures and backlogs in July. Newsom promised it would issue a report within 45 days.

The strike team failed to meet that deadline. That’s understandable. With California facing multiple crises — and with the eternally intractable issues that plague government bureaucracies — it’s no surprise the strike team needed some extra time.

This still doesn’t explain Newsom’s decision to dump the report late Saturday. At the very least, Newsom’s team could have provided reporters with an embargoed copy of the report so they could be prepared to inform Californians about the report’s findings and recommendations.

For example, we now know that “California will not accept new unemployment claims over the next two weeks while the state’s Employment Development Department adopts new fraud prevention technology and works to clear out a backlog,” according to a story by The Sacramento Bee’s Adam Ashton.

“The 45-day review by technology and government experts found that the backlog of unresolved claims at the state Employment Development Department is growing rapidly, by 10,000 a day, and — although Newsom wanted it eliminated by the end of this month — will take several more months to be cleared,” reported Patrick McGreevy of the Los Angeles Times.

The report highlights problems and failures with the EDD’s performance during the coronavirus pandemic and makes 100 recommendations to improve service. The failures are hardly surprising. The coronavirus pandemic is testing all of our systems in unprecedented ways. Newsom may not be responsible for the EDD’s lack of preparedness, but he is responsible for fixing the mess. His attempt to bury the report does not inspire confidence.

Californians deserve better. Newsom should hold a press conference specifically to discuss the findings of the EDD report. Ideally, he would schedule it for a weekday morning instead of a Saturday night.