Unanimous Consent Request

Floor Speech

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Mr. SCHUMER. Madam President, over the past few months, both parties have worked together to provide historic levels of funding to help small businesses retain employees, meet payroll, and stay afloat during the COVID-19 pandemic. The Paycheck Protection Program--the main instrument to help small businesses--received $349 billion under the CARES Act and another $310 billion in supplemental legislation.

The public has a right to know how this money is being spent. Oversight, transparency, and accountability are crucial because from the moment the administration began implementing these funds, it became clear that much of it wasn't going to those who needed it most.

Today, we are not taking any other action on the floor dealing with COVID. We thought we would take this opportunity to ask unanimous consent to get something real done that should have bipartisan support on both sides of the aisle. Who can be against transparency? Who can be against accountability? Who cannot want to know where close to $700 billion of the taxpayers' money is going? Is it going to the right places?

Unfortunately, today at least 200 publicly traded companies have managed to secure PPP loans, and most of those are not very small, including some companies whose owners are large contributors to President Trump. Truly small businesses, however--the hundreds of thousands of mom-and-pop shops with less than 20 employees, the proverbial restaurant owner or the butcher, the baker, and the candlestick maker--have been mostly shut out because they didn't have a standing relationship with a big bank.

There have been great disparities when it comes to minority-owned businesses. According to the Center for Responsible Lending, over 90 percent of African-American-owned and Latino-owned businesses were likely shut out of PPP funding. Women-owned businesses have also been neglected. We have tried to fix some of these problems in COVID 3.5, working closely with the Senators from Maryland and New Hampshire and the Senator from Florida, but much more needs to be done. We need data to help further inform who is being left out so we can continue to make the necessary fixes to see that all small businesses are helped.

My friends Senators Cardin and Shaheen have a bill they worked on to do just that. I want to thank them. They will talk more about this bill in a moment, but I want to make one point here. This is a very simple piece of legislation. It requires the kind of transparency expected from any Federal program of this size and importance: regular public reporting of how and where taxpayer dollars are spent.

This is something my Republican colleagues have always believed in. I hope they will not object just because it comes from this side of the aisle. It is a good idea. There is no reason to object to this very unobjectionable idea and get this body focused on COVID, not on extraneous matters, which we seem to be doing now, when COVID is the most important issue we face.

We are doing quite literally nothing else on the floor of the Senate today. There is no other business before us, no votes whatsoever. We are here to force some action, force some progress, and force some focus on COVID-related legislation. I prefer to do this in a completely bipartisan way. But from the get-go, Democrats have had to force the issue on many COVID response programs. The leader lays down a bill, it has no Democratic input, and then, of course, we have to work toward that goal, and we have. The fact that the first bill passed 96 to 0 is a tribute to this body that we can come together when there is real need.

We should be doing it the same way today. We should be working together in support of our healthcare system, for testing so desperately needed, unemployment insurance, and crucial improvements to small business lending, all of which Democrats said we needed--our Republican friends first resisted and then came along, led by the Republican leader--and all of which passed with unanimous support.

The same thing should happen today. We should pass this.

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Mr. SCHUMER. I want to thank my colleagues not only for their eloquent remarks but their hard work. We know that Senator Rubio has a 2:30 appointment so Senator Blumenthal has graciously agreed to speak after we ask our unanimous consent request.

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Mr. SCHUMER. I want to thank my colleague from Florida. I believe he is sincere and has the best of intentions to want to make this program work.

I want to make two quick points. The first point is, the more data we have and the sooner we have it, the better we can make the program. It will not slow it down. It will improve it and make it better--the sooner the better.

Second, about demographic information, I understand the problem, but there are a lot of ways to skin that cat. If we looked at ZIP Codes, we might very easily be able to tell demographic information.

I thank my colleague. I regret that we cannot move this legislation-- the only COVID legislation that will be talked about on the floor thus far, even though we were asked by the majority leader to come back during the crisis, and I hope we can move forward quickly in the future to get the kind of information we need.

I yield to the Senator from Connecticut.

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