Baptistnews.com reported this important piece of information. Private schools have scored billions from the Paycheck Protection Program. This represents a massive transfer of public funding to private and religious schools. Of course, this fulfills a major policy goal of the Trump administration.

Americans United for Separation of Church and State reviewed federal records and calculated that private schools collected billions of dollars from the Paycheck Protection Program, which was enacted to save small businesses at risk of going bankrupt.

Americans United for Separation of Church and State has long considered public funding for religious schools, which comprise 67% of all American private schools, to be both bad policy and contrary to Constitutional intent. Americans United’s analysis of the data released by the Small Business Administration on PPP loans of $150,000 or greater reveals that Congress has already given private religious and secular schools funding totaling between $2.67 billion and $6.47 billion. PPP funding comes in the form of forgivable loans, which were intended to provide financial assistance to small businesses and nonprofits to recover from the pandemic. As long as the private schools meet certain criteria, like using the loan for payroll and operational expenses, the loans will be forgiven by the government in their entirety, essentially turning the loans into grants.