Democrats Say COVID Relief Money Is Going to Corporations Without Real Oversight

Kamala Harris and Katie Porter are concerned there’s no one in charge of policing the process.

Erin Scott/AP

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

As part of its sweeping coronavirus relief package enacted in March, Congress allotted $500 billion to help stabilize businesses and local governments suffering from the economic crisis. But two Democratic lawmakers are concerned that the Treasury Department is allocating these funds to corporations without meaningful oversight, since the body that’s supposed to govern the process remains leaderless.

“The American people deserve rigorous and thoughtful oversight of this taxpayer-funded relief to American businesses and industries hurt by the 2019 novel coronavirus,” Rep. Katie Porter and Sen. Kamala Harris, both from California, wrote in a letter sent Wednesday to congressional leadership. 

The majority of the billions of dollars allotted by the CARES Act for economic stabilization come with few restrictions on how they are spent. The law tasked the Treasury Department with overseeing the distribution of these funds and creating administrative rules to govern the specifics of who receives the funds and what they may be used for. The department’s handling of the funds has already encountered some criticism, after a May report found that in the two months following the CARES Act’s passage, only $37.5 of the $500 billion had been spent. More spending, however, is on the horizon, after Treasury created a number of programs to distribute more of these funds, including one focused on giving loans to small and mid-sized businesses.

The group in charge of policing that spending, however, is still leaderless. The CARES Act created a five-member Congressional Oversight Commission to oversee how the $500 billion was being spent. It required House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to agree on a person to chair the commission. After more than two months, Pelosi and McConnell have yet to make an appointment. Porter and Harris contend in their letter that this lack of leadership has stymied the commission’s mandate to check up on how the relief funds are being used. The pair note that for the commission to act on the authorities assigned to it by Congress—such as holding hearings—a majority of the commission must vote to move forward. But the commission currently has only four members, so reaching a majority may prove difficult.

“Until the Commission has a Chairperson, taxpayers are funding a bailout without the mandated accountability,” their letter notes.

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate