[ZeroHedge] Topline: A weekly allowance or a lemonade stand are great ways to teach young kids how to manage their money. A loan from the Small Business Administration is not.
Yet according to the Department of Government Efficiency, the SBA issued 5,593 loans in 2020 and 2021 worth $312 million to businesses whose listed owners were 11 years old or younger. Either America’s children have suddenly become expert entrepreneurs or, more likely, another round of fraud from the Covid-19 pandemic has been uncovered.
DOGE also claimed that the SBA gave 3,095 loans worth $333 million to borrowers who were listed as 115 years or older, bringing the total age-related fraud to $645 million.
Key facts: An SBA spokesperson confirmed to the fact-checking site Snopes that "According to our preliminary analysis, SBA can confirm that over 5,500 loans, totaling about $312M, were distributed to businesses whose only listed owner was 11 years old or younger at the time of the disbursement."
The White House did not offer additional context to Snopes or FOX News, and it’s unclear how the loans were actually used. Isabel Casillas Guzman, the SBA administrator at the time when the loans were paid, also did not return Snopes’ request for comment.
Snopes noted that it’s possible the loans were paid to adult borrowers, but the recipients appear as children in the government database because of poor recordkeeping.
Either way, the mistake is serious. The Pandemic Response Accountability Committee recently claimed that at least $79 billion of fraud during the pandemic was “readily preventable,” but government officials were not verifying Social Security numbers before paying out loans.
Search all federal, state and local salaries and vendor spending with the world’s largest government spending database at OpenTheBooks.com.
Background: Though DOGE provided taxpayers with a great service by announcing the potential fraud publicly, full transparency would require the government to release records showing the loans so DOGE’s claims can be independently verified.
That’s a common theme with DOGE’s efforts to fight government waste. After DOGE announced it had cancelled 7 million active Social Security numbers for people 120 years or older, OpenTheBooks filed a Freedom of Information Act request for a list of Social Security disbursements by age group. The Social Security Administration claimed that no records exist.
OpenTheBooks also analyzed every program cancelled by DOGE as of May 27 and found that the average person can only verify the dollar figures for 42% of the contracts and 27% of the grants. That doesn’t necessarily mean DOGE’s dollar figures are mistaken, but it means that public sites like USAspending.gov that record government spending data are insufficient for full transparency because they do not update in real time.
Summary: Whether or not 11-year-olds actually received loans from the SBA, it’s clear that government recordkeeping and fraud prevention measures need a serious overhaul.
Continued on Page 47
Posted by: Fred ||
07/06/2025 00:00 ||
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#1
A reminder.
Starmer got fewer votes in 2024 than Corbyn in 2019, his share of the vote increased modestly from 32.1% to 33.7%.
In '24 the Tories collapsed and Labour didn't, which translated into a Labour landslide in parliament, even though the electorate shifted to the Reform UK right.
#2
Elon has good intentions (and lots of money) but the Uniparty will always find just enough votes to keep the grift, scam, power…. going, It has been proven many times over the last 100+ years.
#3
Tea Paety Part II. However a lot of those went MAGA. Elon is an engineer use to dealing with tolerances of preciseness. Trump is dealing with humans which is messy similar to the making of sausage. Given that the Donks are intractable in a power game, neither party is going to get the 2/3rd in both houses to start the amending process, short of Civil War II.
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