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Where did the money land?
After a long wait and plenty of hounding from Congress, oversight agencies, and outside groups, a deluge of Paycheck Protection Program loan data was released Monday.
Though there are may ways to slice the data, one interesting window is to look at the number of loans by congressional district. As Fortune‘s analysis shows, the districts that saw the most loans tended to be in the wealthiest enclaves in California, New York and Texas. The 10 districts receiving the most PPP loans over $150,000 are represented in the chart below.
The highest number of loans were awarded in Jerry Nadler’s New York 10th congressional district (6,976). The 10th district includes parts of upper and lower Manhattan (including the Financial District) and Brooklyn. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s district, the 14th district of New York, meanwhile, received a much smaller pool of 728 forgivable loans.
Others in the top 10 districts to get the taxpayer loans include Republican Dan Crenshaw, whose district, the 2nd of Texas, came in No. 2 with 5,247 loans over $150,000. Democrat Diana DeGette’s 1st district of Colorado rounded out the top three, with 4,805 loans for her district based in Denver.
Some of the congressional districts, in places like New York City, that took home the most PPP loans were also among the hardest hit by initial shutdowns.
One interesting note: Georgia’s 6th Congressional District is currently represented by Democrat Lucy McBath, which came in at No. 9. That district’s move from a Republican stronghold, which was once represented by Newt Gingrich, to Democratic district is symbolic of the country’s wealthiest enclaves drifting away from the Republican party to the Democratic party. In 2012, Mitt Romney won 54% of the voters with incomes over $200,000 household incomes, that number fell to 48% for Donald Trump, according to New York Times exit poll data.
Meanwhile, chairwoman of the House’s Committee on Small Business Nydia Velázquez’s district secured 4,799 loans for New York’s 7th district—which includes parts of Queens, Brooklyn, and lower Manhattan. Rep. Velázquez has been a key figure in the small business emergency aid program, and has expressed frustration with the administration’s approach to transparency: She wrote in a joint statement with Richard Neal (D-Mass.) and Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) on June 22 that, “only sharing data on disbursements above [$150,000] is utterly inadequate.”
Rep. Carolyn Maloney’s 12th district in New York received 4,441 loans, encompassing areas in Midtown and the Upper East Side, while California’s 33rd district, represented by Ted Lieu, came in at No. 6 with 4,346 forgivable loans.
Among the three California districts to receive the most loans is Katie Porter’s 45th district—securing 4,124 PPP loans for her Orange County, California district. Porter has echoed Velázquez’ concerns about a lack of transparency for the Small Business Administration’s program, and declared on MSNBC on July 1 that, “Even if [Treasury Secretary Steve] Mnuchin gives us some of these data, we need to be acting legislatively to ensure we’re going to have the information throughout the program,” as the program still has over $130 billion of unused funds as of June 30.
Texas representative Kenny Marchant’s 24th district (one of the two Republicans whose districts hit the top 10) secured 3,959 PPP loans.
The 28th district of California, which includes Pasadena and Hollywood, came in at No. 10, with 3,663 PPP loans over $150,000. The district is represented by Democrat Adam Schiff, who also chairs the House Select Committee on Intelligence.
Although the public got its first look at exactly who got loans, the disclosures on Monday only covered about 14% of the total number of PPP borrowers, as the majority of loans fell under the $150,000 threshold. Now, the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis is “working to ensure more oversight and more transparency for this critical program,” Rep. James Clyburn, the subcommittee’s chairman, said in a statement Monday.
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