Subsidy Clawback Tracker

Companies receive billions in public subsidies with promises to create and maintain jobs. When those jobs disappear, clawback provisions should return taxpayer money — but enforcement is rare. This investigation cross-references subsidy beneficiaries against WARN Act mass layoff notices to identify companies that took public money and later cut workers.

Scale

Across 48 states, 1,657 companies that received public subsidies later filed WARN Act layoff notices, affecting 145,241 workers. Combined subsidy exposure: $39.2B.

Of these, 152 companies are flagged as high-priority clawback candidates — cases where the layoff came within 5-10 years of the subsidy award and the subsidy exceeded $100,000. 71 of 152 received programs with explicit job-creation commitments (grants, MEGADEALs, training reimbursements), giving the strongest legal basis for clawback enforcement.

Top States by Worker Impact

Methodology

• Subsidy data from Good Jobs First Subsidy Tracker (48 states)
• WARN Act mass layoff notices from state DOL databases (100+ worker threshold)
• Entity matching via 3-tier normalization (exact, word-overlap, containment)
• Worker counts deduplicated by (company, date, workers) to prevent cross-state inflation
• Subsidy exposure deduplicated per company

Caveats

• WARN Act only covers layoffs of 100+ workers — smaller reductions go unreported
• Absence of public clawback enforcement evidence does not prove no enforcement occurred
• Some matches reflect subsidiary-level layoffs at companies with parent-level subsidies
• FL WARN data embeds addresses in company names (~17.8% of rows), which may inflate match scores

Downloads

• High-priority clawback candidates (CSV)
• FOIA target list (CSV)

For newsrooms: contact editor@thepublicledgers.org for the full dataset and FOIA templates.