Thomas Buckley, Author at California Globe

What are the Recall Candidates Saying About the State of California Public Education?

August 9, 2021 2:20 amAugust 12, 2021 2:21 pm

Even before the pandemic, California’s public schools were not something to write home about. But what COVID, and the related mandates and closures and distance learning and union intransigence did to it, seems to have obliterated whatever shred of credibility...

What the Recall Candidates are Saying About the State’s Most Dysfunctional Agency

August 2, 2021 5:05 pmAugust 2, 2021 4:19 pm

One of the hot button issues of the entire recall effort has been California’s Employment Development Department’s disastrous handling of the massive unemployment increase, a result of the pandemic and its concomitant state-ordered business lockdowns. The mishandling – which managed...

What California Could Have Done with the $30 Billion Lost by the EDD

July 19, 2021 6:14 pmJuly 21, 2021 5:00 pm

It is, sadly, a fact of life that the public has become so inured to the vapor trail of zeroes involved in governmental financial mismanagement that sometimes those big numbers lose their meaning. Take, for example, the loss to fraud...

California EDD: Misinformation, Poor Communication, Miserable Claimant Services, Fraud Issues

July 5, 2021 7:20 amJuly 6, 2021 3:41 pm

California’s Employment Development Department new claim that it told state legislators and others of the “New Year’s Eve Massacre,” which saw unemployment benefits summarily cut off to 1.4 million people a week before it occurred, is being met angry derision...

How to Fix the California’s Unemployment Agency

May 17, 2021 8:16 amMay 17, 2021 8:27 am

California’s unemployment insurance agency, the Employment Development Department, has had a rough year. True, the wounds were self-inflicted; it’s as if EDD went to a gun range and fired at everything except the target, so much so that the “collateral...

EDD’s Communications Fog Compounds Agency’s Problems, Infuriates Claimants

May 13, 2021 2:45 amMay 12, 2021 8:22 pm

What we’ve got here is a failure to communicate. California’s self-beleaguered Employment Development Department has shown a clear inability to successfully do its most basic task – that is, getting money into the hands of people who were legitimately unemployed...

Why Can’t Government Do IT?

April 12, 2021 7:05 amApril 12, 2021 7:05 am

With the rather significant failures of various government technology systems – specifically those involved in implementing proper, fraud-free unemployment benefit disbursement – the question of ‘why can’t government do big tech?’ has lurched back into public view. If you think government lags...