PPP and EIDL pushed $1.16 trillion out the door — $792.6B through some 5,500 lenders and $370.3B made directly by the SBA. Fintech agents sat at the front sourcing borrowers, federal contractors built and ran the loan systems behind the SBA, and SBA put likely fraud in PPP and COVID-EIDL at $36 billion while its Inspector General put potential fraud in the same two programs at more than $200 billion.
Interactive · ecosystem map50 actors · 7 layersSources: SBA FOIA, USASpending, House Subcommittee, DOJ, SBA OIG — cited per node
$1.16T
PPP + EIDL disbursed ($792.6B + $370.3B)
15.1M
Loans: 11.47M PPP + 3.68M EIDL
10
Contractors built and ran the loan systems; their figures mix ceilings, obligations and subcontract payments, so they do not sum
$1.08B
Fees to one facilitator, Blueacorn, alone
$36B / $200B+
Two estimates of the same two programs on different definitions: SBA's ~$36B “likely fraud” from its own reviews, OIG 23-09's $200B+ “potentially fraudulent”
Fig. 01 · Interactive
Fifty actors that touched the money — and who was watching
Seven layers, left to right: federal agencies appropriate and administer; contractors build and run the loan systems; lenders originate the PPP loans; fintech facilitators source the borrowers on the lenders' paper; borrowers receive 15 million loans. State agencies run the parallel channel below; enforcement and oversight sit across the top, pointing down. Tap or click an actor for its figures and sources; drag a node to rearrange.
Federal agencies
Contractors
Lenders
Facilitators
Borrowers
State agencies
Enforcement & oversight
Money & authorityDisputedOversight
All figures are program totals or documented contract values; individual criminal matters carry a confidence flag inside each actor's card
(DocumentedReportedEstimateAlleged).
Source: SBA PPP FOIA (11,468,210 loans / $792.6B); EIDL portfolio ($370.3B); USASpending.gov contract awards; House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis; SBA OIG 22-10 / 23-09; DOJ · In the archive
MethodPPP and EIDL are different machines. PPP loans were made by roughly 5,500 lenders, guaranteed by the SBA, paid a lender fee, and forgiven if spent on payroll. EIDL loans were made directly by the SBA — no originating lender — with the decisioning engine built by contractors (Rapid Finance under RER Solutions). "Facilitators" (Blueacorn, Womply, Lendio, Biz2Credit) were agents, not lenders: they sourced borrowers and processed applications on a lender's paper and were paid per funded loan. Contract dollars are USASpending obligations or ceilings; the RER "$340M windfall" and the batch-approval directives are findings of the House Select Subcommittee's EIDL report, "Idle on EIDL Fraud" (June 14, 2022), and the Paynerd fee split of its PPP fintech report(original: coronavirus-democrats-oversight.house.gov · stored capture) (December 1, 2022) — document productions rather than the contractors' admissions, and flagged Reported. Each node lists its own sources by name; those citations are not individually hyperlinked. The $36B and $200B+ fraud figures are not two ends of one range: SBA's June 2023 figure is “likely fraud” identified by its own human-led reviews of PPP and COVID-EIDL, while its Inspector General's report 23-09(original: sba.gov · stored capture) estimates “potentially fraudulent” COVID-EIDL loans, EIDL Targeted and Supplemental Targeted Advances and PPP loans from fraud indicators. Both are flagged Estimate. Blueacorn's founder convictions and the FTC settlements are Documented. Layout is a live force simulation seeded from the layers above; positions carry no meaning beyond the left-to-right flow of money.