Pandemic Darlings The pandemic economy, in original documents
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Guides

One page per relief program the archive covers: what the program was, its dates and amounts, where it appears in the filings and data, and what the enforcement tables count. Every figure links to the record it came from.

How to use this archive

How to use this archive: the sections, search, what the labels on a document page mean, what "indexed" and "held" mean, and how to cite.

Program guides

  • The Paycheck Protection Program — 11,468,210 loans in the SBA's file, $792.6 billion approved, 4,680 originating lenders; 94 indexed court-filing pages and 58 source documents name it, as do 1,793 DOJ pandemic-fraud releases.
  • COVID Economic Injury Disaster Loans — 3,680,124 awards in the USASpending export; named by 19 indexed court-filing pages, 11 source documents, and 886 DOJ releases.
  • The Restaurant Revitalization Fund — 100,828 awards in the SBA's file against $28.6 billion appropriated; 14 indexed court-filing pages, 3 source documents, and 25 DOJ releases carry its name.
  • The Shuttered Venue Operators Grant — $16.25 billion appropriated, an award snapshot as of July 5, 2022; in the filings 6 indexed court-filing pages and 3 source documents; in the DOJ index 8 releases.
  • Pandemic unemployment insurance — PUA, PEUC, FPUC and MEUC, paid through 53 state agencies; GAO puts the fraud at $100 billion to $135 billion; overpayments established and recovered, state by state.
  • The Employee Retention Credit — about $283 billion provided to employers by June 2025, 83 percent of its refunds issued in 2022 or later; the 2023 moratorium, the disclosure programs and 73 Justice Department case announcements.

Enforcement timelines

  • SBA borrower suspensions, 2025–2026 — A dated record of the SBA’s pandemic-loan borrower suspensions, from the 2025 collections restart to the 870,000-borrower action of September 14, 2026.

What the guides rest on

Each guide is built from records already in the archive: the statute references, the SBA's own program documents, Congressional Research Service and inspector-general reports, the court filings, and the data tables. Counts of pages, releases, and sentences were measured on the archive's own files on 2026-09-12 and will drift as conversion continues; the section indexes carry the current totals. The guides describe the programs and point to the records. They do not adjudicate any case, and an indictment, complaint, or press release cited on them is an accusation or an announcement, not a finding.

Related

Pages elsewhere in the archive that link to these guides.

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