We all remember when Democrats trotted out and shamed certain ‘unworthy’ businesses who had applied for COVID bailout funding… yet they turned a blind eye to Planned Parenthood?
And they claim REPUBLICANS are beholden to their benefactors. Planned Parenthood is among the biggest players of the bunch.
And any money sent to them is little more than a pass-through to Democrat campaign coffers. In a crazy year like 2020, with so many of the usual donors suddenly scrambling, 80 million is a lot of money to piss away needlessly — especially when some business that were ACTUALLY struggling were left out in the cold because other companies soaked up all the funding.
How many mom-and-pop operations might that $80 million have saved from bankruptcy had it flowed to the people who really needed it?
Senator Josh Hawley (R., Mo.) wants to know how Planned Parenthood soaked up $80 million it was expressly ineligible to receive, and is demanding answers of the Small Business Administration.
The CARES Act, which created the PPP to administer forgivable loans to small businesses affected by the COVID-19 pandemic and related shutdowns, explicitly stated that nonprofits organized as affiliates — Planned Parenthood’s business model — did not qualify as small businesses for the purposes of the loans.
Even so, the SBA disbursed a total of $80 million in those loans to 37 Planned Parenthood affiliates across the country.
“Section 1102 of [the CARES Act] says that nonprofits are eligible for the program only if they and their affiliate organizations have no more than 500 employees. As the White House correctly said last month, Planned Parenthood, at about 16,000 employees nationally, fails to meet this requirement,” Hawley wrote in his letter.
“In the light of the clear text of the CARES Act and Planned Parenthood’s own admission that every one of its offices are affiliated with each other, it is hard to conclude anything other than that Planned Parenthood committed fraud,” the letter went on. “The SBA application form required each of the 37 Planned Parenthood affiliates to certify that Planned Parenthood, as a whole, employs no more than 500 employees. The application form further required Planned Parenthood to certify that it ‘underst[oo]d that knowingly making a false statement to obtain a guaranteed loan from SBA is punishable under the law.’”
It is worth noting, too, that Planned Parenthood itself has openly acknowledged that its affiliates were ineligible for the PPP loans, complaining about that fact on its website: “The bill gives the Small Business Administration broad discretion to exclude Planned Parenthood affiliates and other non-profits serving people with low incomes and deny them benefits under the new small business loan program.” — National Review
They were not eligible for these funds.
They KNEW they were not eligible, having said so on their website.
They applied anyway.
The received it… somehow?
The took it.
How is this not fraud?
