Now Comes Kiddie LoanGate: The Washington Culture Of Free Stuff Must Be Snuffed

If this outrage doesn’t do it, we don’t know what will. It seems that over the weekend the DOGE unleashed what should surely turn out to be the Mother of All Bombshells (MOAB). To wit, it found that during the pandemic/stimmy madness of 2020-2021, the SBA handed out 5,593 loans worth $312 million to—

“… borrowers whose only listed owner was 11 YEARS OLD OR YOUNGER at the time of the loan.”

OK. When others use the all caps gambit we find it more than a bit irritating, too. But my god, even six loans to children—to say nothing of nearly 6,000 worth one-quarter of a billion dollars—should never happen in any Federal agency with even a minimal regard for the hard-earned taxpayers’ money in their care. Yet it all happened under the stewardship of a Trump appointee, Jovita Carranza, who was apparently the go-to Hispanic on the GOP’s Washington appointments dance card at the time, and also utterly emblematic of the anything-goes UniParty modus operandi that suffuses the Swamp.

After a middling career at UPS starting as a box-opener, Carranza became deputy administrator of SBA under Bush the Younger during 2006 to 2008 and then in 2017 was appointed by Trump as Treasurer of the United States until 2019, whereupon she became SBA Administrator through the end of 2020. In the “gap” years of 2009-2016 Carranza apparently started a consulting operation called the JCR Group, which claimed to advise “corporations and NGOs on issues of business development and profit and loss management”.

Even Grok-3 can’t find a trace on the web of JCR Group’s operations, however, during these seven gap years between GOP patronage jobs:

Despite Carranza’s high-profile roles, JCR Group itself does not appear to have a robust public presence (sic!). As of March 10, 2025…detailed public information is scarce—likely due to its private nature and her subsequent return to government.

Well, you don’t say! When you are in the Washington grifting business and need to fill the gap between political appointments, keeping a low profile would seem to be the sensible way to go. Still, Carranza’s tenure as SBA Administrator was marked by what has to be the most egregious outbreak of reckless disregard for the integrity of the public purse since the New Deal, or perhaps ever. During 2020 and into early 2021 the SBA put out 14.9 million loans worth more than $1.143 trillion—and that’s with a “T”—even as there was virtually no oversight, monitoring or investigation of applications whatsoever. And, as it happened, fully $757 billion or 95% of the PPP loans were were forgiven, while the $324 billion of EIDL loans have maturities of up to 30 years, with these “loans” bearing interest rates of barely 3%.

Now here’s the thing. During FY 2019, which was a typical year, the SBA issued only 58,400 loans and guarantees, which together were valued at $28 billion. So the frenzy of loan making on Carranza’s watch amounted to about 260X the annual loan volume in numbers and 41X the normal volume in dollar value.