NPR. In August of 2025, Erica

Marquintarfer lost her job. So she did what a lot of newly unemployed people do. She went to apply for unemployment benefits.

And early in the process, she had to verify her identity.

In the state that I was applying, it's an app that you download on your phone, you take a picture of your license, and then you take a selfie and the software verifies that it's you.

Seems simple enough.

But Erica actually had a lot of trouble uploading a photo

or license to this app.

It would just sort of spin and then die and say failure to, like, register your picture.

And I tried changing the lighting.

I tried deleting the app and reinstalling it.

I went on Reddit.

Erica called the State Unemployment office. They told her to just keep trying the app. It was so frustrating that I got

stuck on the identity verification step because I was like, listen, Google me. Let's get on a Zoom.

You can look at my face. I am literally on the front page of the New York Times.

Yeah.

That's because Erica was arguably the most famous unemployed person in America at the time.

President Trump had fired her from her job as commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

This is the indicator from Planet Money.

I'm Adrienne Ma.

And I'm Waylon Wong.

Economists like Erica say the U.S. unemployment insurance system is badly in need of improvement.

Today on the show, we diagnose what's wrong with the current system and here's some ideas on how to fix it.

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