Planned Parenthood, the largest abortion provider in the United States, erroneously got more than $67 million in no-payback loans under the Paycheck Protection Program in the early days of the pandemic, Rep. Claudia Tenney said on Newsmax Thursday.
The money was intended to help the nation's small businesses, and the abortion provider must give that money back, she said.
"It was clear in the statute and under the Trump administration's guidance that Planned Parenthood clearly wasn't able to receive this because of the employee threshold — having 16,000 employees nationwide prohibited them from getting this," the New York Republican said on Newsmax's "Wake Up America."
"They jumped through a bunch of hurdles [and] bypassed the laws, so that our nation's largest abortion provider, which is prohibited from getting taxpayer dollars, got taxpayer money and the loans were forgiven," Tenney said.
Her comments come after she questioned Isabella Guzman, administrator of the Small Business Administration (SBA) on Wednesday about the pandemic relief loans that were awarded to Planned Parenthood.
Tenney has pressed Guzman before about the PPP loans, as well as SBA Inspector General Hannibal "Mike" Ware over his failure to stop the payments, according to a statement from her office.
"I am sick and tired of SBA's duplicity and lack of honesty on this topic. Congress writes the laws, and the agencies, including the SBA, are bound to abide by them," Tenney said in the statement. "I am urging my colleagues on the Appropriations Committee to withhold funding from the SBA for fiscal year 2023 equal to the amount of loans illegally forgiven for Planned Parenthood affiliates.
"The American people strongly oppose taxpayer-funded abortions, and they deserve better than this."
Thursday, she pointed out on Newsmax that her office has been asking for information from Guzman for several months about the loans, and on the day before this week's hearing got a "vague, very bureaucratic-sounding explanation" for why the loans were allowed.
"She claimed that there was no control, that these Planned Parenthood affiliates were really just small businesses," said Tenney. "But we proved that that wasn't true. The Trump administration actually came out and in the statute, it says, you know the exercise or the existence of control by the national organization over these affiliates disqualified them, and we proved that the national organization of Planned Parenthood controls the affiliate, so, therefore, they are a major corporation that improperly got taxpayer dollars."
Tenney also rejected the argument that the loans slipped through the cracks, accusing the SBA of having "created this phony exemption, saying that somehow Planned Parenthood is the same as a restaurant and a hotel."
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Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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