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Law360 (May 5, 2020, 8:15 PM EDT) -- The U.S. Department of Labor on Tuesday said states can spend federal funds on programs that give laid-off workers jobs tracking coronavirus exposures, a day after the top Democrat on the Senate work committee urged the administration to redeploy the unemployed as a "public health workforce."
The announcement allows recipients of more than $160 million in so-called dislocated worker grants to use the money for "contact tracing" programs that aim to stop the spread of COVID-19 by tracking patients' contacts and alerting people who have been exposed.
"The department encourages states to expend these funds on activities that involve identifying and notifying individuals who may have been exposed to the coronavirus to slow or stop the spread of the virus," the agency said. "If tracing is conducted thoroughly and properly, it can be an effective tool to quarantine and isolate potential cases of the virus and may contribute to its containment."
The Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act of 2014 provides for the DOL to dole out grants to help state and local authorities expand skills training, career counseling and other dislocated-worker programs during economic crises that cause job losses.
The Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security Act passed in late March provided $345 million to fund dislocated-worker grants during the pandemic. The DOL has awarded about $161 million in funding to 31 states and territories so far, it said.
States can use those funds for contact tracing "if the purpose of the tracing is in response to and in order to mitigate the public health emergency," the agency said Tuesday.
The announcement comes a day after Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee ranking member Patty Murray, D-Wash., sent Labor Secretary Eugene Scalia and Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar a letter urging them to attack the jobs and health crises by hiring unemployed workers as contact tracers.
The DOL said April 30 that nearly 4 million workers filed for unemployment in the week ending April 25, bringing the number of workers who have filed for unemployment since mid-March to more than 30 million. Meanwhile, public health experts have said robust contact tracing must be the centerpiece of the nation's virus response.
"This public health strategy will require the recruitment, training and deployment of potentially hundreds of thousands of new public health workers across the country," Murray said.
A spokesperson for Murray did not immediately provide a comment on the DOL's announcement Tuesday.
--Editing by Aaron Pelc.
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