District court orders SBA to release PPP, EIDL loan information
The U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia last week ordered the Small Business Administration (SBA) to release the names, addresses, and loan amounts for all paycheck protection program (PPP) and economic injury disaster loan (EIDL) recipients by Nov. 19, 2020.
The order follows Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, which the SBA attempted to appease through the release of their loan-level data earlier this year – without the names, addresses or specific amounts of each loan.
In response to the earlier requests, the SBA argued that FOIA exemptions 4 and 6 protected this information by shielding from the disclosure of any “commercial or financial information obtained from a person and privileged or confidential,” as well as “personnel and medical files and similar files the disclosure of which would constitute a clearly unwarranted invasion of personal privacy.”
Through the new order, the district court explained that it found the disclosure of the information would dramatically outweigh any limited private interest in non-disclosure.
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