In big reversal, SBA, Treasury Department to disclose details about some loan recipients

The U.S. Small Business Administration and Treasury Department announced Friday that they would release a dataset showing which businesses received many taxpayer-funded Paycheck Protection Program loans, walking back an earlier stance that all of the business names would remain hidden because the Trump administration considered them proprietary.

The disclosures will pertain to firms that borrowed more than $150,000 as part of the program. Borrowers who obtained loans of less than $150,000 would not have their identities disclosed, the agencies said in a joint statement.

The Friday afternoon announcement came after several weeks of tense negotiations with congressional leadership, in which members of both parties pressed for some form of disclosure. The plan announced Friday would amount to a compromise in which most loan recipients will be made public while specific details would be obscured.

“We are striking the appropriate balance of providing public transparency, while protecting the payroll and personal income information of small businesses, sole proprietors, and independent contractors,” Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said in a statement.

It was the Trump administration’s latest reversal on the matter. The SBA said in response to open records requests throughout April and May that it would release “individual loan data” in accordance with its past practice for subsidized loans. But Mnuchin claimed in a June 11 hearing before the Senate Committee on Small Business and Entrepreneurship that the business names and loan amounts would considered confidential.

Sen. Marco Rubio (R.-Fla.), who played a lead role in designing the program, said he was satisfied with the plan announced Friday.

“The American people deserve to know how effective the PPP was in protecting our nation’s small businesses and the tens of millions of Americans they employ. That is the standard by which we must measure the success of the PPP: how many paychecks were protected,” Rubio said in a statement.

Under the new plan, loan recipients getting $150,000 or more would be disclosed. Some details of that loan would also be disclosed, though the precise dollar amount would be kept confidential. Borrowers that received loans of less than $150,000 would be kept secret.

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