About DOL

The U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) is a federal cabinet-level department that holds a discretionary budget of almost $15 billion. The mission of the department is to foster an economy and workforce that includes and respects every American. It does this by three primary functions:

• Invest in the American Worker: Through investments in training, job placement and benefits, DOL invests in workers so that they are prepared for the present and future jobs in the American economy.
• Protect the American Worker: To ensure that workers receive promised wages and work in safe workplaces, DOL regulates over 7 million businesses to protect workers’ finances, physical wellbeing, and right to organize.
• Provide Accurate, Transparent and Insightful Labor Market Information: Through entities like the Bureau of Labor Statistics and others, DOL provides important labor data to the federal administration, financial markets and myriad stakeholders in our economy.

The challenge

How might the U.S. Department of Labor build and deploy effective, equitable, and accessible programs that protect against fraud?

With the passage of historic legislation in the form of the American Rescue Plan and the proposed American Jobs Plan, the administration and DOL are laser-focused on rebuilding the American workforce. Actors inside and outside of government are ready to work in concert to rebuild a better American economy, and DOL is poised to help guide historic change that benefits the American worker.

DOL is embarking on a series of ambitious initiatives to build the labor force back better, modernize the department to meet the demands of the future of work, and build a more inclusive economy.

The Presidential Innovation Fellow will report to the Chief Innovation Officer (CInO) at the U.S. Department of Labor. The PIF will advise the CInO on matters related to innovation technologies and best practices, taking on special projects such as:

• Optimizing unemployment insurance and setting a foundation for a re-employment system: The President has named unemployment insurance as a top priority. The Presidential Innovation Fellow will work side-by-side with the CInO to create a plan to roll out the four unemployment insurances in the latest stimulus plan in an equitable and accessible manner that avoids wide-scale fraud. Additionally, the PIF will support the CInO in working with an already-assigned team from the United States Digital Service (USDS) to build and vet a service design blueprint for a set of central technology solutions that states can use to better deliver these benefits.
• Unified worker data: Currently, there is no unified way or method to track the outcomes for all the American workers that DOL serves through its investments (benefits, job placement services, training). This is the product of fractured and federated systems at the federal, state and local levels. These systems are also siloed across sectors (higher education, community based organizations, industry). Our goal is to map out a way to track this data more effectively and roll out this method to states and other stakeholders in short order.

The Presidential Innovation Fellow will have expertise in product development and product management.