The fired labor economist who couldn't get unemployment

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  NPR.

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  In August of 2025, Erica McIntyre lost her job.

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  So she did what a lot of newly unemployed people do.

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  She went to apply for unemployment benefits.

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

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  In the state that I was applying, it's an app that you download on your phone.

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  You take a picture of your license and then you take a selfie and the software verifies that it's you.

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  Seems simple enough.

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  But Erica actually had a lot of trouble uploading a photo of her license to this app.

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  It would just sort of spin and then die and say "failure to register your picture." And I tried changing the lighting.

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  I tried deleting the app and reinstalling it.

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  I went on Reddit.

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  Erica called the state unemployment office.

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  They told her to just keep trying the app.

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  It was so frustrating that I got stuck on the identity verification step because I was like,

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  "Listen, Google me. Let's get on a Zoom. You can look at my face.

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  I am literally on the front page of the New York Times." Yeah,

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

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

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  This is The Indicator for Planet Money.

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