Senate Democrats led by Minority Leader Chuck Schumer are pressing the Trump administration to stop targeting Planned Parenthood affiliates that got emergency small business loans designed to keep workers employed during the pandemic.
Forty-one members of the Senate Democratic Caucus sent a warning to the Treasury Department and Small Business Administration after it was revealed last week that the SBA told Planned Parenthood centers they were ineligible for the Paycheck Protection Program loans they had received.
The SBA’s position, which Planned Parenthood disputes, has been that individual locations of the nonprofit organization may have violated size limits on the loans because of their affiliation with the Planned Parenthood Federation of America.
In their letter to Treasury and the SBA, Senate Democrats defended the right of independent Planned Parenthood organizations with fewer than 500 employees to receive the loans, which can be forgiven if the borrowers maintain their payrolls.
They said conservative media reporting that broke news of the conflict strongly suggests that Planned Parenthood is being singled out from more than 4.3 million loans that have been issued under this program. The senators said the SBA should implement the program “without ideological efforts to treat certain nonprofit organizations differently from others.”
“In light of these developments, we ask that the SBA stop ideologically-driven action against Planned Parenthood organizations through the unequal application of the affiliation rule in order to score political points for this administration by attacking nonprofit health care providers,” they said.
The SBA and the Treasury Department did not immediately comment on the letter, which was also signed by Sens. Ben Cardin (D-Md.), Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and most other members of the Senate Democratic Caucus.
In a letter last week signed by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, Senate Republicans led by Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) asked Attorney General William Barr to investigate the matter, arguing the loan program was “not designed to give government funds to politicized, partisan abortion providers.”
Planned Parenthood has argued that Planned Parenthood tax-exempt 501(c)(3) organizations are independent and that the loans awarded complied with the rules of the program.