Rep. Chip Roy is pushing to change a pending coronavirus relief fund for restaurants to remove its “racist” provisions that give minority- and women-owned businesses priority in the distribution line for a time.
The Texas Republican introduced the Restaurant Revitalization Fund Fairness Act on Tuesday to ensure that grant requests would be met on a first-come, first-serve basis. Over 177,000 requests from restaurants for money to help offset coronavirus-induced costs have not been met since the fund was first introduced as part of the Biden administration’s American Rescue Plan.
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“If money is spent, the government should not discriminate based on race and other woke criteria,” Roy said in a statement to the Washington Examiner. “Yet, that is precisely what Democrats did rendering tens of thousands of restaurants ineligible for relief under the Restaurant Revitalization Fund. We should right this wrong.”
The program suffered from mismanagement under the Small Business Administration, which had a 21-day exclusivity window for applicants who came from socially and economically advantaged backgrounds. A Texas court ordered an injunction on the practice in June 2021.
Roy said his proposal would make sure “that existing COVID dollars be used to prioritize the 177,300 eligible restaurant owners that were discriminated against and denied relief under the original program and repeal the original RRF’s unconstitutional and racist prioritization scheme that has no place in America.”
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The congressman also emphasized that he would prefer to “stop spending any money at all at this point, … but if a single dollar is spent, it should be spent to help businesses crushed by lockdowns and discrimination.”
A move to replenish the restaurant fund was dropped from the spending bills in March, but the COVID-19 aid bill being negotiated in Congress could include up to $42 billion in aid for restaurants. The initial budget for restaurant bailouts was underfunded, with only $28 billion to work with and hundreds of thousands of applicants that weren’t able to get a piece of the pie.
