Dozens of Congress members have written a letter urging the administrator of the U.S. Small Business Administration to retrieve the tens of millions of dollars Planned Parenthood received through the congressionally approved Paycheck Protection Program.
“These loans are intended for struggling small businesses, and PPFA clearly exceeds the affiliation rules and size standards,” the members of Congress said in their letter to the SBA’s Jovita Carranza.
“We are encouraged by SBA’s letter dated May 19, 2020, to PPFA’s affiliate, Planned Parenthood of Metropolitan Washington, Inc., in which SBA has notified the organization that it is ineligible for these PPP funds,” they continued. “We wholeheartedly support the decision to block funding to this PPFA affiliate, but we also encourage the SBA to apply the same standards to all PPFA affiliates.”
The letter was posted online by Rep. Doug Collins, R-Ga., who was joined by dozens of other Congress members, including Reps. Jodey Arrington, Mike Johnson, Matt Gaetz, John Joyce, Chuck Fleischmann, Virginia Foxx, Jim Banks, Ralph Norman, Andy Harris, William Timmons, Bill Flores, Neal Dunn, Carol Miller, Ted Budd, Steve King, Bill Huizenga, Jody Hice, Darin LaHood, Ted Yoho and Barry Loudermilk.
The letter said members “made sure that Planned Parenthood affiliates would be ineligible to receive PPP dollars when it established the program in the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act (CARES Act), which states that nonprofits with 500 or fewer employees are eligible for these loans. Despite the fact that Planned Parenthood has a staff of 16,000 employees, they still applied and accepted these taxpayer dollars.
“We noted that PPFA affiliates applied for more than $80 million in PPP loans. Additionally, in the PPP funding data released by the SBA on July 6, 2020, on the organizations that received more than $150,000, over 40 PPFA organizations are listed as being approved for loans for as much as $151 million of the PPP dollars.”
The Congress members want to be “informed whether the PPP funds approved for PPFA affiliates have, in fact, been disbursed, per the list released on July 6, 2020.”
“We also request an update on if the SBA has already asked for these funds to be returned and if and when the SBA has or will receive the returned funds.”
Other signatures came from Reps. Jim Jordan, Steve Chabot, Gus Bilirakis, Michael Waltz, Glenn Grothman, John Rose, Christopher Smith, Doug Collins, H. Morgan Griffith, Rick Allen, Brad Wenstrup, Kevin Hern, David Kustoff, K. Mixchael Conaway, Mike Kelly, Steve Wakins, Debbie Lesko, Russ Fulcher, Alex Mooney, Kelly Armstrong, Blaine Kuetkemeyer, Jason Smith, Ralph Abraham, Andy Biggs and Tom Cole.
