Submitted by United States Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana
WASHINGTON (December 5, 2024) – Senator John Kennedy (R-La.) spoke on the Senate floor about his effort to ensure that more Americans can find the money that the federal government may owe them through mature, unclaimed savings bonds. In a letter to the National Association of Unclaimed Property Administrators, Kennedy also announced that the U.S. Department of Treasury will begin sharing data about unclaimed savings bonds with state officials in Summer 2025.
Key excerpts from the speech are below:
“Now, government waste takes many forms, but I’ll tell you one form—it’s the purest form. It’s when the federal government has taxpayer money, and it doesn’t belong to the federal government, but the federal government refuses to give it back. And that’s the case we have at the Department of Treasury.”
. . .
“For a long time, the Department of Treasury has had the names of these 95 million people or their heirs, and it totals $38 billion. So, naive as I was, I went to the Department of Treasury and said, you know, we need to give this money back to people. What’s the problem? You got names, you got addresses. After a while, you didn’t have to be Einstein’s cousin to figure out they weren’t going to cooperate with me.”
. . .
“So, I finally just went and passed a bill. I passed the Unclaimed Savings Bond Act. . . . . And then Treasury said, ‘You know, it’s not really our job to go look for people. We can put up a toll-free number.’ I said, ‘Here’s what we’ll do: I want you to cooperate with the states.’ Every state has an unclaimed property program.”
. . .
“And my purpose of being here today is to try to tell folks, after eight years, we are going—in this summer, in about six months—we’re going to take all those digital records, names and addresses, and they’re going to be sent to the state treasurer in every state. And the state treasurers are anxious to put their names and addresses on their websites.”
Background:
- As of May 2024, the U.S. Treasury had more than 95 million mature, unclaimed savings bonds. Those had a combined value of roughly $38 billion. Kennedy authored the Unclaimed Savings Bond Act of 2021, which was signed into law as part of the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2023.
- This law requires the U.S. Treasury to share information about the owners of unclaimed savings bonds with officials in every state. This will allow state treasurers to add information about mature, unredeemed savings bonds to the state’s unclaimed property program. That will enable more Americans to locate and claim their missing investments.
- Kennedy managed Louisiana’s unclaimed property program for 17 years while serving as state treasurer. During this time, Kennedy reunited Louisianians with roughly $400 million in their unclaimed property.
Kennedy’s letter to the National Association of Unclaimed Property Administrators is available here.
