The PPP Was a COVID-Era Disaster. Trump Wants To Promote the Guy Who Ran It.
The pandemic-era Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) was a bloated, wasteful mess—and now the guy responsible for running it is getting a promotion.
President-elect Donald Trump announced Wednesday that he’d nominated Michael Faulkender to be his deputy Treasury Secretary, effectively the second-in-command position at one of the federal government’s most vital departments. Faulkender is a professor of finance at the University of Maryland’s business school and serves as chief economist for the America First Policy Institute, a pro-Trump think tank founded in 2021.
“Mike is a distinguished economist and policy practitioner who will drive our America-first agenda,” Trump posted on Truth Social.
Faulkender was the assistant secretary for economic policy at the Treasury Department during the first Trump administration, and it was in that role that he oversaw the PPP, a stimulus program that ultimately distributed more than $800 billion.
That money was supposed to go to businesses that had been shuttered by the pandemic (or by various governmental edicts), and it was supposed to keep furloughed workers on the payroll until reopening. In fairness, at least some of the PPP’s budget was used for that purpose, but we now know that much—maybe even most—of the PPP funds ended up being wasted or stolen.
“Only 23 to 34 percent of the program’s funds went directly to workers who would have otherwise lost their jobs,” a National Bureau of Economic Research study found. Another study by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis found that taxpayers paid roughly $4 for every $1 of wages and benefits to workers.
Some of the PPP’s funds likely ended up in the pockets of business owners rather than funding workers’ paychecks, a New York Times investigation concluded. A lot of it was simply stolen—so much, in fact, that the Government Accountability Office (GAO) says a full accounting of the losses “will never be known with certainty.”
Any massive, rapidly assembled stimulus program that’s under orders from Congress to spend money first and ask questions later is going to be ripe for fraud, of course. Still, the overwhelming size of the PPP’s losses points to mismanagement as a significant factor.
Both internal and external reviews of the PPP’s losses have come to that conclusion. A 2022 audit published by the Small Business Administration’s inspector general poin
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