In this year’s coronavirus bailout bills, lobbyists earned their pay by helping Big Business make off like bandits with public funds.
Around the March CARES Act, well-connected lobbying groups worked the phones to ensure the bill was tilted towards aiding the largest corporations and wealthy investors. More than half of the money from the bill’s Paycheck Protection Program (PPP), which was supposed to be for small business, ended up going to only 5% of recipients, especially 600 large companies, according to the most recent data. The bill also included a $454 billion slush fund for the Treasury Department to bail out large corporations.
