Sen. Mitch McConnell and Donald Trump can never again be allowed to be in charge of $2.2 trillion in emergency spending programs, because they can't be trusted to ever do anything for the country without rigging it for their base. Their real base: the robber barons. They do this by creating billions in slush funds with minimum transparency, which is exactly what they did in the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act, as The Washington Post reports.
Some of the recipients of the aid included in the bill have to be reported, but the recipients of about $349 billion of it—an amount that can provide as much as $10 million per "small" business—don't have to be disclosed. So the businesses applying for these loans from the Small Business Administration aren't necessarily going to be what you think of as a small, struggling business. That's one of the reasons Democrats aren't willing to go along with McConnell's push to just give another $250 billion in funding for the program—not without conditions that include making sure it goes to small community banks and microlenders to help actual community businesses. But that's just a drop in the bucket of the untraceable trillions.
The Federal Reserve also has billions of dollars to dole out, and the Fed chairman can choose to keep where it goes a secret. This means only congressional leadership is allowed to know where it's going, and the public isn’t. That's a big problem. "You can only truly measure the success or failure of programs if you know where the money is going," Neil Barofsky, the former inspector general who oversaw the bailout in the last financial crisis, told the Post. "As a matter of basic governance, there should be disclosure of recipients of government bailout money." To be clear, that's ultimately taxpayer money, and yes, there should be disclosure.
Trump's attacks on inspectors general include attempting to assert veto power over what little transparency was written into the bill at the insistence of Democrats. It does have a special inspector general (whom Trump has has tried to remove), a congressional review commission, and an "accountability committee" composed of other inspectors general. In his signing statement to the CARES Act, Trump declared that the inspectors general must have "presidential supervision" before releasing any reports to Congress.
For now, Fed Chairman Jerome Powell has stressed transparency, saying in a speech Thursday that the Fed has to be accountable to the public and that he doesn't view the money under his control as a slush fund. "I would stress that these are lending powers, not spending powers," Powell said, adding that "the loans will be fully repaid."