About Pandemic Darlings

What this is

Pandemic Darlings collects the public record of the pandemic relief programs and publishes it in one place, free to read. Court filings, agency reports, inspector-general audits, congressional material, company filings, contracts, arbitration records, and the official loan- and award-level data files sit at the bottom of the site. Everything else here, the articles, profiles, interactives, program guides and derived tables, is built on top of them and links back to them. When a page and a document disagree, the document wins and the page gets fixed.

The site is not affiliated with any government agency. Nothing here is legal advice.

What is in the archive

As of October 23, 2026: 11,691 court-filing pages, 32,130 source documents, 21 statute references, and 34 derived data tables built from 8 federal source releases; on top of them, 611 profiles of people and companies, 66 articles and 34 interactives. The section indexes carry the current counts; pages are added in every release, and the numbers on this page are the ones measured when it was built.

Court filings come with the extracted text of each document and, where the record allows it, the original file. The court-filings section also contains the agency and congressional record: SBA program forms, notices, and FAQs; SBA Office of Inspector General reports; Congressional Research Service reports; Select Subcommittee staff reports and letters; Federal Reserve facility disclosures; and bill texts. The source-documents section contains a second body of government, company and program records, catalogued by issuer, type, and date, along with the archive's own copies of the news articles the site cites. The data section contains the official loan-level data: 11,468,210 PPP loans in the SBA's file and 3,680,124 COVID EIDL awards from USASpending. It also has the RRF and SVOG award files and a corpus of 135,405 Department of Justice press releases, with derived tables you can download as CSV.

Where the documents come from

Courts. Federal dockets and filings come from PACER and from the free RECAP archive at CourtListener; state-court records come from county clerk portals. Acquisition is free-first: a paid PACER purchase is the last resort, made one document at a time when no free copy exists, and every acquisition is logged with its source.

Agencies and Congress. Records are taken from the issuing agency's own site, from Congress.gov, from SEC EDGAR, and from FOIA releases.

The contemporaneous record. Company releases, industry letters, and program guidance from 2020 through 2022 are preserved with their dates, so that later claims can be checked against what was said at the time. News articles that a page relies on are archived here too, each with a link to the publisher's original.

How files are processed

Preserve. Every document is archived as filed. The original file is the record; nothing on this site replaces it. Originals are served where the record allows it (the link on a page reads "View original PDF" and states the file's size in bytes); the rest are published as extracted text.

Extract. Text comes from the document's own text layer where one exists. Scanned documents are run through Tesseract OCR. Pages that fail quality checks (broken encodings, garbled glyphs) are re-processed page by page rather than shipped dirty. Where no usable text exists yet, the page says "Full text unavailable".

Summarize. Many document pages carry a short summary, labeled as such. A Claude model drafts it from the document's text on that page, and a script checks every date, number, name and docket cite in the draft against that text before the summary can appear. A summary is a navigation aid, never a source: cite the document.

Publish. Each document becomes a readable page with its extracted text and its record facts: court or issuer, the filing or document date, the source, and the case it belongs to. Titles are normalized from raw filing names by script, with model assistance and a human-maintained override table checked against the document. Duplicate or low-quality conversions are kept but marked not-for-indexing rather than deleted. Wherever a page on this site cites a document, the link goes first to the archive's own page for it; that page links to the original at the court, agency or publisher.

Release. New and corrected pages go live in two scheduled releases a day.

Index. The search index is updated in each release.

The methodology page covers the rest: the authority tiers, what the labels on a page mean, how to tell a verbatim title from a composed one, and how to cite a page.

How pages are checked

Before each release, scripted checks run over the site: links, sourcing, page structure and house wording. A new failure stops the release until the page is fixed. A daily fact-check works through the live pages in rotation, setting each page's statements against the documents it cites, and each error it finds is logged for correction. New articles, profiles and interactives, new sections, and major updates to a profile are read and approved by the editor before they publish.

Where models are used, and where they are not

This archive is built with substantial AI assistance. Anthropic's Claude Opus 5.5 does most of the model work, and Claude Sonnet 5.5 drafts the document summaries. Tesseract handles OCR. The documents themselves are never AI-generated; numbers come from the underlying data files. The AI use page names the other models, lists each step and says where a model is involved.

Corrections

When the record proves a page wrong, the page is fixed. What to send when you find an error is on the corrections page.

Data and reproducibility

Derived datasets ship as CSV downloads with their provenance: the official source files they were built from, the cleaning steps applied, and the known quirks in the underlying data. Every file in the data release is listed with its SHA-256 checksum, byte size, and row count. Tables reconcile to the underlying datasets, not to secondhand summaries.

Reuse and citation

The underlying documents are public records. Tables and text from this site may be quoted with a link back to the page they came from. Each data page carries a suggested citation; the form for citing a document page is on the methodology page.