(Sophie Mann) The Golden Horseshoe is a weekly designation from Just the News intended to highlight egregious examples of wasteful taxpayer spending by the government. The award is named for the horseshoe-shaped toilet seats for military airplanes that cost the Pentagon a whopping $640 each back in the 1980s.
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by Sophie Mann, May 1st, 2021
This week, our award is going to the United States Small Business Administration and Treasury Department for awarding at least $200 million, but as much as $420 million, to Chinese Communist Party-linked businesses by way of the Paycheck Protection Program, intended to assist U.S. small businesses that were devastated by the coronavirus pandemic, widely believed to have originated in China.
A report from the Horizon Advisory strategic consulting group illustrates how negligible congressional oversight allowed at least 125 Chinese firms to “take advantage of the international disaster” by benefitting “directly from U.S. investment and relief measures.”
The report, entitled “China’s Protection Racket,” reveals that publicly available data on the recipients of PPP loans show that “U.S. federal funds intended for Covid-19 recovery and emergency support of U.S. small businesses are benefitting a host of companies owned or invested in by entities based in the People’s Republic of China.”
The 125 companies that de la Bruyere and Picarsic uncovered have received somewhere between $192 million and $419 million in emergency U.S. taxpayer funding. The significant range is due to the relatively broad way that PPP loans are publicly disclosed. Instead of citing a specific amount that a given business received, it will be listed as having received, for instance, $5-$10 million. Each of these companies was authorized for a loan by the SBA during the initial round of PPP funding.
Noting the irony that while U.S. taxpayer dollars flowed toward propping up Chinese-backed companies “the PPP program did not reach every small business that has been harmed by the Covid-19 crisis,” the report observes: “Many U.S. small businesses that did not receive funding have closed up shop or permanently shrunk their work force.”
“Many of these firms, by virtue of their Chinese government support and connections to large PRC-based conglomerates, conceivably could access sources of capital from public or private markets to support their U.S. operations,” according to the authors.
“To date, Congress has not conducted any meaningful oversight over China’s access to PPP loans,” they write. “Nor has it restricted access to companies with military ties to Beijing, those that have been accused of IP theft and other predatory behaviors, or those that have been documented as national security risks.”
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