The Oversight Commission has released its second report on what’s happening with half a trillion dollars of the public’s money. Here are highlights from the report--including some important admissions from the Treasury and the Fed in response to the Commission’s questions. 1/

The big picture: the agencies have announced how they will use less than half of the $454B fund and actually used only $6.7B. That's worked out well for big corporations that benefit from the promise of action but less well for smaller companies and municipal governments. 2/

Unemployment remains very high. The Fed said in response to our questions that it “designed the facilities to work together to protect financial stability and support achievement of its dual mandate of full employment and price stability.” Keep that employment goal in mind... 3/

...Because the only employment-related condition in these programs is the weak requirement for firms in the Main Street program to make “commercially reasonable efforts” to maintain payroll. But the Fed admits it won’t even monitor whether individual companies are complying! 4/

The agencies also admit the goal of buying old corporate bonds is to lower the cost of new bonds for big companies. But there’s also a Fed program to buy new bonds. So why broadly subsidize corporate bondholders by buying all those old bonds? 5/

The Treasury and the Fed have also committed to releasing all 2200+ comments they received about the Main Street program. We’ve asked them to release the comments in searchable form so the public can more easily review them. 6/

The full report is available here.

https://www.toomey.senate.gov/files/documents/Congressional%20Oversight%20Commission%20Report%20(June%2018,%202020).pdf

An important final note: 83 days after the passage of the CARES Act, the Commission still lacks a Chair and staff. We will continue to do our work, but these are serious obstacles to performing robust oversight. END