On Tuesday’s broadcast of CNBC’s “Last Call,” Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA) stated that he is willing to talk with House Speaker Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) on spending, some coronavirus relief money should be clawed back, and he thinks there would be bipartisan agreement on doing so.
Khanna said, “I’m willing to sit down with him, and I have before. We’ve worked on legislation. Here’s one thing I think, bipartisan, we could get behind: The people who got some of the COVID money who should not have qualified for it, multimillion-dollar firms that basically gamed the system, why don’t we audit everyone who took those COVID loans and make sure they actually qualified? That’d be a start.”
Host Brian Sullivan then cut in to ask, “You sure you want to do that, Congressman? Because you may not like what you find. You can search who took COVID money on — it’s public data, and I don’t know if you want to do that.”
Khanna responded, “Well, look, I’m all for the mom-and-pop shops getting it, but if you’re a multimillion-dollar business and you got COVID funding and you didn’t qualify, that should be money coming back to the taxpayers. There’s a lot more that I want in terms of repealing some of the top tax cuts for the very wealthy that Trump had and Bush had, but those are going to be more contentious. But the COVID money that went out to people who didn’t deserve it, that should be bipartisan.”
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