Congress Steps Up Pressure as Trump Administration Evades Bailout Oversight
WASHINGTON — House Democrats opened an investigation on Monday into the distribution of more than $500 billion in small-business loans under a pandemic relief program, escalating a clash with the Trump administration as it resists oversight of trillions of dollars in coronavirus assistance funds.
The announcement from the seven Democrats on a committee created to scrutinize how the administration is spending pandemic relief money came as Steven Mnuchin, the Treasury secretary, abruptly pivoted under pressure from lawmakers and said he would work to disclose more about where government-backed money was going through the lending initiative, the Paycheck Protection Program.
It was the latest indication that, despite attempts by lawmakers to build layers of oversight into the largest stimulus program of its kind in modern history, an administration that has been hostile to congressional scrutiny continues to resist. In a letter to four congressional committees last week, the heads of an independent accountability panel created by the law alerted lawmakers that lawyers for the Treasury Department were interpreting the statute in a way to exempt more than $1 trillion from scrutiny.
“The administration should release the names of all P.P.P. borrowers — as the S.B.A. routinely does for similar loan programs,” the lawmakers wrote in a letter to the heads of the Treasury Department and the Small Business Administration, which jointly administer the program. It came days after Mr. Mnuchin told a Senate committee that information was “proprietary” and not public.
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