WASHINGTON, D.C. - Today, Ranking Member Blaine Luetkemeyer (R-MO) testified before the House Rules Committee on H.R. 3807 as amended, the Relief for Restaurants and other Hard Hit Small Businesses Act of 2022:

Ranking Member Luetkemeyer’s opening statement as prepared for delivery:

Thank you, Mr. Chairman and Acting Ranking Member Burgess for having us this afternoon.

It has been just over two years since the CARES Act was signed into law.  Since that time, we have spent approximately $6 trillion dollars as a nation to fight COVID-19.  Small businesses alone have received over $1.2 trillion in forgivable loans and other grants. 

Said in another way, the small businesses ecosystem has had an injection with over a trillion dollars of easy money. 

These numbers are staggering. Yet here we are again, debating more money and more relief in the form of grants. 

And while we are sitting here in Washington deciding whether to add more money to certain industries, our nation is experiencing price shocks that have not been felt in over 40 years. 

Inflation is burning through our nation at a rapid pace.  From food and shelter to gas and energy, prices in every category of life are increasing exponentially with no end in sight. 

American families feel this pain, businesses feel this pain, and the nation’s smallest firms feel this pain. 

In fact, small business owners are reporting that their number one problem is inflation. 

Unfortunately, injecting more money into the system will simply fuel the fire of inflation.

However, my colleagues on the other side continue to spend now and think later when it comes to COVID-19.

They are failing to grasp that injecting more money into our system will further fan the flames of inflation.  

It doesn’t matter that our nation as a whole has learned much more about this pandemic.  We’ve learned how to safely go about our lives. 

Small business owners are some of the most innovative and nimble enterprises in America.  They can pivot quickly and most importantly; they can adapt to any situation with speed.  We saw this over the last two years.  

This time, small businesses need the freedom to operate independently without Washington watching over them. We must end the COVID economy and government handouts. Furthermore, this bill creates yet again another new grant program at the SBA. Enough is enough. The SBA’s incapable of operating grant programs. Let’s review their history in this area over the last two years. 

The Economic Injury Disaster Loan program is filled with fraud and identity theft issues and the SBA is a blackhole when it comes to answering questions for constituent businesses. 

The IG report indicates, as the chairman just indicated, that there is roughly 30% fraud in just this one program, which is a combination of direct loans and grants, similar to what we are trying to do here with this new program. It’s a system of grants. How can we continue to give them the ability to oversee these programs and administer these programs when they haven’t proved they can do it right with the past programs?

Mind-boggling.

There’s also a second grant program that was put together was the Shuttered Venue Operators Grant Program. The SVOG was signed into law in December of 2020.

Disappointingly and after long delays, the SBA attempted to launch this program in April.  The night before it went live, the SBA’s Inspector General sent out a warning signal.  Did the SBA listen?  No.  They went ahead anyway and within hours, the program crashed.  The program then took another two months to launch.  This was unacceptable.

You’d think the SBA has learned their lesson and come up with ways to put this program in place within a few days, a few weeks, a few months? I have no idea. The track record indicates it would be a disaster.

The last program that they put together was the Restaurant Revitalization Fund. I would like to remind everyone that this program was woefully underfunded.  However, more shocking was the fact that Congressional Democrats, the Biden Administration, and the SBA prioritized certain businesses over others. They picked winners and losers with American taxpayer dollars. It was so bad that courts declared this program unconstitutional. I repeat this program was declared unconstitutional. It was stopped! So, this bill does fix that problem, but in the meantime, you had a hundred seventy-seven thousand businesses who applied for a loan that prioritized out with the ability to get it even though they may have been in front of the line in front of some of these folks.

I think we need to move on. I think that there’s a better way to go about this. I have a separate bill that actually solves the problem without creating new money which is what this is. The problem with the funding of this bill is it “hopes” that we can recover the dollars from existing fraudulent activities within the PPP and the EIDL programs. 

So far, they have recovered about ten billion of the necessary fifty-five to fund this. It’s a hope and a prayer to think we can do the rest. This is not the way you fund bills. This is not the way you propose legislation. By hope and a prayer, you’re going to be able to find the money for it. I think this is irresponsible. I think there is a better way to do this. You know, I have a bill to fix this problem and I think in a responsible way.

With that, Mr. Chairman, I yield back my time. 

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