Who Is Getting All That Paycheck Protection Program Money?

and restaurants. Nicholas wou, politics reporter at USA Today, joins us for more on the p p P. Thanks for joining us, Nicholas, Thanks so much for having me so. The Small Business Administration and the Treasury Department have released the names of more than six hundred and sixty businesses that received between one hundred and fifty thousand or up to the ten million dollar maximum for the Paycheck Protection Program.

In total, they say they dispatched more than five hundred and twenty one billion dollars to nearly four point nine million in businesses since early April. I think they said that healthcare and I T services were among the biggest recipients in all of this, But as we are looking into the businesses that have gotten some of this money. We're starting to find connections to people in Congress. We're

starting to find connections to some very wealthy businesses. I think Kanye West, his company was also a recipient of all this. So help us break some of this down, Nicholas, who's getting all of this money? This was a massive

data dump. There's over six hundred sixty names, and that's just in the businesses that we got all the names for UH and these were the businesses that got over one hundred fifty thousand dollars in loans, but the great majority of the loans given we're actually for under that amount,

and all the names were redacted for those. So it's a wide range of businesses here, everything from you know, your mom and pop kind of restaurants and stores up to UH some businesses that were franchises of major corporations, to yes, the yacht clubs and the wineries and the businesses that are connected to members of Congress. Obviously, this is to help get people through the coronavirus shutdowns, But what do the people have to do to apply and successfully get a loan? So it was kind of a

tricky process. So that the idea was to provide forgivable loans to small businesses in order to keep all of their employees on through the coronavirus pandemic. And the criteria was that you needed to have five hundred or fewer workers and you could get a low interest loan of

up to ten million dollars. And originally, as it was written, a lot of franchises of major corporations were eligible because the total number of employees you had was counted by the individual business unit, not as part of the overall, you know, large corporation that is something like McDonald's. So that caused a lot of controversy, but was changed once the program him was renewed. And so tell us some of the big names that we're getting some money in this.

As mentioned the beginning, there was a lot of lawmaker connected businesses that received some of this money. What we noticed as as we're going through the data is that some of these businesses are connected to some of the wealthiest members of Congress, and a lot of these members do own small businesses on the side too. So for instance, we noticed everyone from Congressman Mike Kelly of Pennsylvania, whose car dealerships received at least three different loans between three

hundred fifty thousand dollars each and one million dollars. Another Congressman, Kevin Earn from Oklahoma, whose compody that's held in the family trust, received loans for their McDonald's franchises. And UH Congressman Matt Cartwright in Pennsylvania. His wife has partnered at a law firm and they received a loan somewhere between three hundred fifty thou dollars and one million. The Treasury Department gave us dollar amounts in terms of ranges, not

in terms of specific amounts. There's not anybody that's been accused of any wrongdoing in any of this. This is just kind of throwing out the names of basically people

who have gotten some of these loans. There are the names of the business is, not of the specific people, so it was it was kind of tricky to actually trace all of them back to who actually owned all of these what's been the overall reception of this program, because I know that there's been a few problems early on in the beginning, there's a lot of businesses that complained that they didn't get anything any money out of this, But it does seem to have helped a vast variety

of businesses get through some of these shutdowns, or at least try to get through some of the shutdowns. It's something that we saw, especially with these businesses owned or linked to lawmakers, was that they emphasize that they were able to keep on staff for the duration of the pandemic. So this was a very popular program, and it was still popular in fact, then it ran out of money

at first because so many people needed the funding. Where the controversy comes in is what order people might have gotten funds in, whether there was any special preference because of connections people had, or in the case of some companies like those controlled by the governor of West Virginia, UM the governor there is a billionaire and he also owns a very large resort complex in the state, which received let's see, between five to ten million dollars worth

of loans. So that's where we're seeing some of the backlash to the p p P program, and it will be interesting to see what Congress does with it the next time it comes up for renewal. It's been extended through August eight. I guess there's still got a few billion to go through or to allocate. When is this

going to come up again? Well, Congress's own recess right now, but they'll come back at the end of July, and they've given themselves a very short window to try to draft and allocate money for a potential next coronavirus stimulus bill. So we'll see exactly what happens there. But as the corona as pandemic continues and as businesses across the country remained shuttered, um it, it looks like this could still very much be a major issue. Nicholas wou politics reporter

at USA Today. Thank you very much for joining us, Thanks for having me on. I'm Oscar Ramirez and this has been reopening America. Don't forget effort today's big news stories. You can check me out on the Daily Dive podcast every Monday the Friday, So follow us on I Heart Radio or wherever you get your podcast.