U.S. Senators Tom Cotton, Ted Cruz, and Marsha Blackburn are among the concerned senators behind a letter urging the U.S. Department of Justice to investigate whether or not Planned Parenthood affiliates received loans from the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) which were reserved for small businesses. As previously reported by Live Action News, Planned Parenthood is said to have received about $80 million in loans from the PPP with the knowledge that it was actually ineligible.
“The Paycheck Protection Program established by the CARES Act was designed by Congress to help struggling small business and nonprofit organizations by giving them access to low-cost loans for expenses like keeping their employees on payroll during this pandemic,” reads the letter. “It was not designed to give government funds to politicized, partisan abortion providers like Planned Parenthood.”
Planned Parenthood, though it considers itself to be a non-profit, enjoyed $110 million in excess revenue in 2018 with assets totaling over $2 billion. The Small Business Administration, which administered the PPP loans, ruled that none of the money could go to Planned Parenthood and the abortion giant was ineligible to apply because the PPP specifically “excludes organizations like Planned Parenthood that employ its type of governance and affiliation structure and exceed the cap of total employees.”
Planned Parenthood, however, disagrees.
Jacqueline Ayers, Planned Parenthood Federation of America’s VP of government relations and public policy, released a statement saying, “Like many other local nonprofits and health care providers, some independent Planned Parenthood 501(c)(3) organizations applied for and were awarded loans under the eligibility rules established by the CARES Act and the Small Business Administration (SBA), which they met,” calling the objections raised “a clear political attack on Planned Parenthood health centers and access to reproductive health care.” Ayers also accused the Trump administration of “using a public health crisis to advance a political agenda and distract from their own failures in protecting the American public from the spread of COVID-19.”
READ: Government tells Planned Parenthood to return $80 million it stole from COVID-19 relief
Many Planned Parenthood affiliates remained open during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic as their state and local governments considered them “essential.” In some areas they chose to limit their services to abortion only. Fox News has reported that an affiliate of Planned Parenthood in Metropolitan Washington self-certified that it was eligible for a $1,328,000 PPP loan, despite never fully shutting down.
At least 37 Planned Parenthood affiliates from around the nation applied for and received millions from the PPP although the Planned Parenthood Action Fund had issued a statement regarding the CARES Act, noting, “The bill gives the Small Business Administration broad discretion to exclude Planned Parenthood affiliates and other non-profits serving people with low incomes and deny them benefits under the new small business loan program.”
Planned Parenthood has aided in the continued sexual abuse of minors, has been caught in Medicaid fraud, and has spent decades lying to vulnerable women and girls about fetal development and abortion risks for their own profit. Planned Parenthood is responsible for the deaths of millions of innocent children. It is a billion-dollar business built on the bodies of its victims, with CEO earnings that place them in the top one percent in the country.
“The funds in the program are not unlimited, and were depleted once already because of high demand,” said the senators in their letter. “Planned Parenthood fraudulently taking tens of millions of dollars that were intended to help keep those small businesses and nonprofit organizations afloat cannot stand and must be addressed.”
The letter to the DOJ states that fraudulent loan applications can result in both civil and criminal penalties.
Read the full letter here.
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