Michele Evermore left her post as the head of the Labor Department’s new Office of Unemployment Insurance Modernization in December after serving nearly two years within the agency.
Her career spans Capitol Hill and the National Employment Law Project and more before Evermore went to the Labor Department to work as a senior advisor in early 2021. In mid-2021 she moved to the role at the new modernization office.
Now working as a senior fellow at the Century Foundation and as a visiting, non-resident scholar at Heldrich Center at Rutgers University, Evermore talked to FCW about what is next for jobless aid, whether the system is ready for a recession (spoiler: she says that it isn’t) and how to think through equity and fraud in unemployment.
Editor's note: the following interview has been lightly edited for clarity and length.
What was it like working on unemployment in the wake of the pandemic?
In a word — intense… 2020 felt like we answered a lot of the questions about pandemic-era benefits. But really, we had a lot more to do in 2021. Making sure those programs operated like they were supposed to was quite a challenge. By 2021, I think people had been working very hard for a long time at state agencies and at the federal level, so making...
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