At least four members of Congress have reportedly benefited in some way from the half-trillion-dollar small business relief program they helped create.
The news adds to pressure on Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, who is administering the program, to provide greater transparency about who receives the relief loans.
A bipartisan group of congressional members has admitted its close relationship to companies that received loans from the program. The businesses are either run by the lawmakers’ families or employ their spouses as senior employees.
The list, according to Politico, includes Republican representatives Roger Williams of Texas, a wealthy businessman who owns car dealerships, body shops, and car washes, and Vicky Hartzler of Missouri, whose family owns a number of farms and equipment sellers in the Midwest. The Democrats include Rep. Susie Lee of Nevada, whose husband is the top executive of a regional casino developer, and Rep. Debbie Mucarsel-Powell of Florida, whose husband is a senior leader at a restaurant chain that has since given back the loan.
More lawmakers are expected to have benefited from the Small Business Administration’s $670 billion Paycheck Protection Program, but only the SBA and the Treasury Department have the information, and the Trump administration has said it is not willing to disclose details about who has received the loans. This means that the decision to disclose who has received a loan, which can be as big as $10 million, is left up to business owners, including federal government officials, to come forward themselves.
Each of the members of Congress who received the small business relief loans say the money was acquired through legal and fair channels as part of the goal to keep people employed, as the program was set up to do.
The conflict of interest prohibitions that Congress put into the $2.3 trillion CARES Act coronavirus legislation in March does not apply to certain components of the law, such as the Paycheck Protection Program.
The new revelation about lawmakers benefiting from the relief program does, however, raise new concerns about their potential conflicts of interest as they create the next coronavirus relief package as well as the current lack of transparency by the Trump administration. The program has already come under severe criticism that larger corporations received loans before the smallest businesses, in addition to many bank lenders and small businesses complaining about the speed, size, and structure of the initiative.
