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Chuck Schumer pushed a program to help shuttered theaters. It reported $10 billion in improper payouts.
The federal government says it handed out more than $180 billion in improper payments last year, largely through major entitlement programs such as Medicare and Medicaid. Yet the program with the highest rate of bad payments by far received little attention.
The Shuttered Venue Operators Grant, a Covid-era handout pitched as a way to support theaters and music halls, reported $10 billion in improper payments, nearly 70% of all spending in the program. Much of the funding went to well-off talent agents and celebrities. Although singular in the scale of its failures, SVOG is a perfect demonstration of how politicians and the press encourage fraud and wasteful spending.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, with the support of Broadway, pushed SVOG as a way to support event spaces hit by Covid lockdowns. The program was established in the 2020 Covid relief act, which President Trump signed at the tail end of his first term, and expanded by the stimulus act that Joe Biden signed the following year. Unlike some Covid relief funds, which were structured as forgivable loans, SVOG was a pure grant. The government expected nothing in return and had no easy way to recoup misspent money.
Continue reading the entire piece at The Wall Street Journal (paywall)
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Judge Glock is the director of research and a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor at City Journal.