More than $200 billion may have been stolen from two large COVID-19 relief initiatives. That’s according to new estimates from a federal watchdog investigating federally funded programs designed to help small businesses survive the worst public health crisis in more than a hundred years.
Is there any that wasn’t stolen or misappropriated?
Gene Sperling, a senior White House official overseeing pandemic relief spending, said in a interview Tuesday that 86% of the fraud, or potential fraud, in the emergency loan programs happened during the first nine months of the pandemic when President Donald Trump was in office.
I strongly suspect that this was by design.
An additional $115 billion mistakenly went to people who should not have received the benefits, according to his testimony.
“Mistakenly”… Turns out, when you roll out relief programs with little to no oversight, the money doesn’t go to what it was purported to be for - who could possibly have foreseen this?
Let’s not forget that Senators who had a hand in implementing the system were also allowed to benefit from it directly, and many of them also directly opposed stricter regulation on its use.