The U.S. Department of Labor told states Wednesday to take immediate action to combat fraud, waste and abuse in their unemployment insurance programs — and that they could have administrative funds withheld if they don't comply.
The letters, which went to the governors of every state, are the latest in a series of actions from President Donald Trump's administration focused on fraud, waste and abuse in state-run programs that include federal funding. Like with most of the other similar announcements, the administration focused on issues in states where Democrats control the government.
“We are officially putting governors on notice,” Acting Labor Secretary Keith Sonderling said in a statement Wednesday. “The American people will no longer tolerate the blatant waste, fraud, and abuse of their hard-earned tax dollars — no state should allow it either. If states allow it, they will suffer the consequences.”
The Labor Department said Wednesday that poor oversight, outdated technology, weak identity verification and lax controls have “allowed unprecedented fraud to flourish.”
In its announcement, it cited problems in California, Illinois and New York — three states where Democrats control the governments.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s office blasted the move and criticized “lax regulations and rushed distribution” of unemployment benefits by the first Trump administration during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Meanwhile California outperforms other states in addressing fraud,” Newsom spokesperson Marissa Saldivar said in a statement.
The federal Labor Department did not immediately respond to questions from The Associated Press about the details of the alleged fraud.
The nonpartisan Government Accountability Office estimated that fraud accounted for between 11% and 15% of the amount paid out through unemployment insurance programs from April 2020 through May 2023, when the nation was under a public health emergency for the pandemic.
During that time — which included the last months of Trump's first term and over half of former President Joe Biden's time in office — access to the funds was eased, and the government noticed the issues as the money was going out.
In the new letter to the states, the department said that consequences from pandemic-era fraud “are still playing out.”
The Labor Department said states would receive further directives in coming weeks.
Vice President JD Vance is overseeing an anti-fraud task force focused on potential misuse of social programs.
The Department of Health and Human Services tried to withhold money for child care subsidies and other social service programs from five states — all governed by Democrats — but has been rebuffed by a court. The department has also announced it’s using artificial intelligence to police how states and other recipients of federal dollars are auditing their program.
The Department of Agriculture has threatened to withhold administrative funds from states that don’t provide data on participants in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, including their immigration status.
Associated Press reporter Sophie Austin in Sacramento, California, contributed to this article.
FILE - Keith Sonderling, President Donald Trump's nominee to be Deputy Secretary of Labor, appears before a Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions hearing for his pending confirmation on Capitol Hill, Feb. 27, 2025, in Washington. (AP Photo/Rod Lamkey Jr., File)
SAN JOSE, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Jun 17, 2026--
Adobe (Nasdaq:ADBE) — the global technology leader that unleashes creativity, productivity and customer experiences through innovative tools and platforms — today announced Adobe Brand Visibility, a new solution for businesses to ensure their brand is visible, trusted and chosen across AI surfaces. The new offering is part of Adobe CX Enterprise, a new end-to-end agentic AI system that simplifies how businesses manage their entire customer lifecycle, from acquiring and engaging prospects to driving conversion and lasting loyalty.
This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20260617041974/en/
Adobe Brand Visibility will enable businesses to succeed in the latest battleground for consumer attention, where audiences are embracing AI-powered chat services and browsers to discover and evaluate product offerings. New data from Adobe highlights the substantial growth in this channel, where AI traffic to U.S. retail sites have surged 1,324% between October 2024 and May 2026. In the travel sector, AI traffic is up 2,215% in the same period.
“In a world where customers often interact with an AI tool before ever reaching a business's website, visibility is everything now,” said Anil Chakravarthy, President, Customer Experience Orchestration Business, Adobe. “Adobe has helped brands navigate and get chosen in every wave of marketing transformation, and Adobe Brand Visibility now provides a comprehensive solution for teams to expand their company's influence across AI surfaces. Following the close of our Semrush acquisition, we moved quickly to integrate its capabilities, and early customer demand has exceeded expectations.”
Adobe Brand Visibility is a comprehensive solution for Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) that combines the industry-leading capabilities of Adobe LLM Optimizer with Semrush’s AI Optimization. Consider a travel brand seeing consumers embrace AI tools for trip planning and competitors being recommended by ChatGPT. With Adobe Brand Visibility—drawing on nearly 300 million real-world AI search prompts (the largest global database of its kind)—teams can see exactly which prompts they are winning or losing. Combined with Adobe’s first-party signals from owned channels, marketers gain a complete picture of how their brand appears across ChatGPT, Google AI Mode, Microsoft Copilot and Perplexity AI, from mention frequency and audience reach to competitive share-of-voice and content gaps. AI agents then surface prioritized recommendations, and updates can then be deployed in minutes, with impact measured directly in the tool. Teams can then connect every GEO action to bookings, pipeline and revenue via integrations to Adobe’s analytics solutions—all in a single workflow.
Adobe Brand Visibility provides businesses with:
Adobe Brand Visibility can be leveraged as a standalone application or as a native integration with Adobe Experience Manager (an agentic content and asset management system) to ensure brands can optimize for both human and AI audiences across their entire content foundation—from web experiences and campaign content to digital assets and commerce catalogs. Adobe’s suite of brand visibility solutions works as a continuous operating model: Brands can sense how they appear across AI-driven discovery surfaces, generate content and experiences grounded in brand context, reach both human audiences and AI systems from a shared foundation, and continuously learn from every interaction to improve performance—all part of an experience flywheel. Powered by AI agent and human collaboration, Adobe’s brand visibility solutions build advantages that strengthen with every cycle.
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Introducing Adobe Brand Visibility: A Unified Solution for the AI Search Era
