Trump administration drops secrecy posture on small-business aid
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Trump administration has abruptly dropped its insistence on secrecy for a $600 billion-plus coronavirus aid program for small businesses.
The administration announced Friday it will publicly
disclose the names of recipients of the taxpayer-funded loans, the
amounts they received in ranges, as well as demographic data on the
businesses.
The unexpected move came after Democratic lawmakers, government watchdogs, ethics advocates and news organizations called for the administration to make the information public.
Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin refused to do so at a Senate hearing last week, saying the data on the Paycheck Protection Program was “proprietary information.” The Small Business Administration, which manages the loan program, has only provided general information, such as the total amounts of loans awarded in a given time period.
Mnuchin said in a statement Friday that the new
position resulted from a bipartisan agreement with leaders of the
Senate Small Business Committee.
The new approach “will strike the
appropriate balance of providing public transparency, while protecting
the payroll and personal income information of small businesses, sole
proprietors and independent contractors,” Mnuchin said.
To that
end, information on loans of less than $150,000 will only be disclosed
in totals by industry, business type and demographic category. Nearly
75% of the total loan amounts approved are over $150,000 and will be
subject to full disclosure, according to the Treasury Department and the
SBA.
In addition, business owners’ personally identifiable
information, such as a home address associated with the loan, will be
withheld.
Critics had denounced the refusal to open the
information to the public as an attempt to dodge accountability for how
the federal aid money is spent. They said it raised questions about how
the money was being distributed and who was benefiting.
Businesses struggled to obtain loans in the early weeks of the program in April, and several hundred publicly traded companies
received loans despite their likely ability to get funding from private
financial sources. Publicly shamed, a number of big corporations said
they would return their loans.
The SBA — an agency with about 3,200 employees and an annual budget shy of $1 billion — is shouldering the massive relief effort for U.S. small businesses and their employees left reeling by the economic punch of the pandemic. A signature piece of Congress’ multitrillion-dollar coronavirus rescue, and touted by President Donald Trump, the unprecedented lending program is intended to help small-business employers stay afloat and preserve jobs in a cratering economy losing tens of millions of them.
As of Friday, the SBA
says it has processed 4.6 million loans worth about $512 billion. The
loans can be forgiven if businesses use the money to keep employees on
payroll or rehire workers who have been laid off.
For the larger
loans, the SBA will disclose the business names, addresses, zip codes,
business types, demographic data, number of jobs supported, and loan
amount ranges: from $150,000 to $350,000, $350,000 to $1 million, $1
million to $2 million, $2 million to $5 million and $5 million to $10
million.
It wasn’t immediately clear when publication of the data was to begin.