Statement from Good Jobs First Regarding Treasury Secretary Mnuchin’s Announcement that Paycheck Protection Program Loans Will Not Be Disclosed
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Statement from Good Jobs First Regarding Mnuchin’s Announcement
Washington, DC—Good Jobs First Executive Director Greg LeRoy today issued the following statement:
“Secretary Mnuchin’s announcement is wrong by every measure and must not stand.
Secretary Mnuchin is just flat wrong when he labels such data to be “proprietary” and “confidential,” suggesting that disclosure could somehow harm the recipients. In fact, Good Jobs First, in its Subsidy Tracker database, has been posting company-specific data about 137 federal incentive programs—including five Small Business Administration loan programs—for five years, many of them originally posted at USAspending.gov. See them enumerated at: https://www.goodjobsfirst.org/subsidy-tracker-federal-data-sources .
“As well, we have been disclosing deal-specific records from more than 900 state and local incentive programs at the same website, with no harm whatsoever to recipient companies.
“Secretary Mnuchin’s position would reverse federal precedent from the Obama stimulus of 2009, in which the federal recovery.gov website posted details about the awarding—and the outcomes every quarter—of every American Recovery and Reinvestment Act award.
“The high level of interest Americans showed in the data at recovery.gov helped the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board keep the stimulus remarkably free of scandals. Millions of eyeballs kept the Recovery Act clean. The fact that Secretary Mnuchin now wants to hide such records suggests he does not share that goal for CARES Act spending.”
What do you think about the announcement? Should the data be disclosed or not? Tell us by sounding off in the comments section.
