Renzo Downey
As Gov. Ron DeSantis deflects blame for the state unemployment claims system debacle, he is highlighting improvements made under his watch.
Agriculture Commissioner Nikki Fried and Senate Democrats blamed the Governor for the application system’s failures during the COVID-19 pandemic. At the peak of the system’s stress, it was down 80% or 90% of the time.
Speaking to reporters Monday, the Governor said engineers have been working behind the scenes to make major overhauls to the CONNECT system. Over the past several weeks, the site has gone down for repairs at night or over the weekend.
But the frustrations for Floridians have not stopped even as the state started dishing out claims in bulk.
“This is not a very simple architecture. This is a very convoluted architecture,” DeSantis said. “There had been a lot of data that had been built up over the last decade that was slowing down the system.”
A wholesale fix of the system with a new contract was a nonstarter for the administration because of the time it would take for a new portal to come online. Handling the problems by hand would have taken months because of the network of federal and state databases necessary to approve a single claim.
Instead, engineers settled on rebuilding the framework, increasing capacity with 72 new servers and removing inefficient code. The state launched a separate unemployment submission system to alleviate stress on CONNECT and a mailable paper application. Last week, the state launched a separate portal for gig workers ineligible for state unemployment to get federal Pandemic Unemployment Assistance funds.
“We had a lot of decision points early because it was pretty clear, as we got into the end of March, this thing, it just wasn’t going to cut it,” DeSantis said.
While the portal is not perfect, the state is making progress, he added. On weekends when the Department of Economic Opportunity (DEO) took down the site, the state processed two spikes 397,000 and 456,000 claims in a day.
The state estimates it has about 900,000 unemployment claims to sort through because of duplicate and triplicate submissions.
Several states have faced challenges with their unemployment portals, but Florida ranked the worst in paying out claims to its unemployed residents during the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a recent study. Still, the Governor avoided any share of the blame during the “unprecedented” economic downturn, pointing instead to the $77.9 million spent before his term to launch the CONNECT system.
“Any system was going to have some problems,” he said. “But if we had anything other than three or four percent unemployment, this system was going to be a problem. Even a mild recession — this would have been a problem, so that’s not good use of taxpayer money.”
The Governor announced he had asked Inspector General Melinda Miguel to investigate the contract and the system failures.
“It’s one thing to not have a good system if you go on the cheap or whatever, but to pay that much money and then all the problems that we had to deal with is a big problem,” he said.
DeSantis highlighted the progress made since he appointed Department of Management Services Secretary Jonathan Satter at the helm of the technological response to unemployment, handled by DEO. One of Satter’s first steps was to transfer call assistance to DEO and to drop training at the DEO call center from three weeks to 24 hours.
