Hiding Government Loan Recipients

The Washington Post reports that the Trump administration can choose to hide the names of companies that apply for federal relief. Legislation to provide relief to businesses apparently doesn't require disclosure of all recipients of aid under the $2.2 trillion coronavirus aid bill. Critics argue that the opacity opens the spending program to fraud and favoritism. Favoritism, especially corrupt self-serving favoritism, is a hallmark of the current administration, e.g., Ivanka Trump, Jared Kushner (currently working on building a massive privacy destroying surveillance system using coronavirus as cover), tax breaks for real estate developers, forced government business for Trump brand resorts and golf courses, etc.

WaPo writes: “Chief among the omissions is the $349 billion expected to be doled out to small companies in chunks as large as $10 million. .... So far, the agency has said it received about 487,000 applications totaling $125 billion in requests. .... A potentially even larger gap involves the trillions going out to businesses under the auspices of the Federal Reserve. .... Proponents of withholding the information argue that identifying coronavirus aid recipients could make firms hesitant to apply out of concerns for privacy, especially if they are small. Other needy firms may fear that an aid application, once made public, could be construed as a sign of financial frailty. Restarting the economy requires getting money to businesses quickly, these proponents say, so programs should avoid requirements that discourage applications.”

As usual, the president and Trump Party (formerly the GOP) prefer to conduct their business in as much secrecy as the law allows, or more if they think they can get away with breaking the law.*** Privacy certainly is a good things for themselves and their friends. Fraud under cover of secrecy and opacity is of no concern to the Trump Party or the president. Of no concern except, of course, in relation to voting and voter registration rolls, where voter fraud is seen as a critically urgent and an overwhelming problem for democracy and civilization itself. That fake perception massive voter fraud exists despite no evidence of widespread voter fraud.

*** Getting away with lawbreaking by the president, his friends and the Trump Party generally is a safe bet now that the Department of Justice has been corrupted and neutered to protect crimes by those people.

One can only wonder how many tens (hundreds?) of billions in taxpayer cash is going to be loaned to businesses that will never pay it back due to their financial frailty. Keeping loan recipients a secret makes it impossible to know if the loans were never merited in the first place. That way the government can falsely claim that all loans were good right from the get go, and no one can contradict such false claims based on data. Failing businesses (indirectly) owned by Ivanka and Jared probably have submitted their loan applications. Even if that is illegal, the federal government is not going to punish it. And, if the loan recipients are kept secret, state law enforcement will never know about any bad or illegal loans.

The hogs are gonna have a huge pigfest at the taxpayer trough. Accountability and transparency are extinct species.