A federal judge thwarted efforts of the Small Business Administration (SBA) to hide information related to disbursements of the Paycheck Protection Program and Emergency Injury Disaster Loan program.
SBA has been dodging Freedom of information Act (FOIA) requests from news organizations regarding how it disbursed $717 billion coronavirus pandemic-related loans.
The SBA had claimed they would violate borrowers’ privacy by revealing business and personal information that should be kept private. So, it only released summarized and anonymized data for loans under $150,000.
But Federal Judge James Boasberg on Thursday ordered the SBA to disclose all the names, addresses, and precise loan amounts issued through the PPP and Emergency Injury Disaster Loan program.
Dozens of news organizations had filed a lawsuit, saying that the agency was not fulfilling its obligations under the FOIA.
The judge called the SBA’s assertion of privacy “fundamentally flawed.”
“The significant public interest in shedding light on SBA’s administration of the PPP and EIDL program dramatically outweighs any limited private interest in nondisclosure.”
Judge James Boasberg
He noted, “the PPP loan application expressly notified potential borrowers — admittedly in a form disclaimer — that their names and loan amounts would be ’automatically released’ upon an FOIA request.”
He slammed SBA for offering “a series of arguments that essentially all reduce to the unavailing contention that the agency did not mean what the loan-application forms actually said.”
Government watchdog groups welcomed the release and pledged to begin scrutinizing the data once released.
Jeremey Funk, spokesman for Accountable.us told NBC News in an email that “From the beginning, the Trump administration did everything in its power to hide the recipients of PPP loans.”
“As soon as the administration abides by the court order and releases all data, we will scour it to see whether more Trump administration officials and family members — and other well-connected folks — than previously known received the loans.”
Jeremey Funk
Accountable.us is a progressive government watchdog group.
Eleven news organizations, including NBC News, The Washington Post, and The New York Times filed the lawsuit.
Center for Public Integrity, a DC-based investigative journalism nonprofit filed a separate lawsuit.
