Kevin Hern Corruption & Ethics Education Oklahoma

Kevin Hern Helped Write the Rule That Let His McDonald's Company Get $1.07 Million Forgiven. Then He Said Student Debt Relief Made Working People Pay for Someone Else.

Bloomberg reported that Hern pushed to make it easier for franchises to get pandemic loans — and a company he controls got $1.07 million, forgiven. Two years later he attacked student loan relief, and the White House replied with the exact number: $1,082,302.

MAGA Report Cards · Aug 09, 2026

In August 2022, the White House's Twitter account did something unusually simple. It found six Republicans who had just attacked President Biden's student debt relief plan, quote-tweeted each one, and posted a single fact underneath: how much federal loan money that member of Congress had already had forgiven.

For one of them, the number was $1,082,302.

That was Kevin Hern.

The thing that makes his case different from the other five isn't the size of the number. It's that, according to Bloomberg, he helped write the rule that made his company eligible in the first place.

Step one: change who counts as a small business

The Paycheck Protection Program was built for small businesses — the corner shop, the two-truck plumber, the diner with nine employees. Congress passed it in March 2020, at the start of the pandemic shutdowns, so that small employers could keep paying people.

Kevin Hern is a McDonald's franchisee. The Frontier reported that he owned 10 Tulsa-area restaurants when he first ran for Congress in 2018, and gave him the nickname "McCongressman." That is not a corner shop.

But franchises got a carve-out. In Bloomberg Opinion, Timothy L. O'Brien wrote it up under a headline that says the whole thing: "'McCongressman' Kevin Hern Gets a Large Order of PPP." The subhead: "Representative Kevin Hern pushed to make it easier for franchises to get federal loans. A company he controls did just that." O'Brien wrote that in March 2020, as Congress debated what became the largest economic bailout in American history, four legislators "pushed hard to make sure that franchise operators received special treatment."

It's worth pausing on the sequence. A sitting member of Congress helps shape the eligibility rules for a federal relief program. The rules end up treating franchise operators favorably. A company that member controls then takes the money.

Step two: take the money

KTAK Corp., the restaurant management company Hern co-owns, received a $1.07 million PPP loan that the government forgave, according to a Poynter fact-check drawing on federal loan records. It went to the five McDonald's the company owned at the time, as Oklahoma Watch later confirmed when readers asked whether an Oklahoma member of Congress had really had more than a million dollars in business loans wiped out while serving in Congress. The answer was yes.

When the loan first became public in July 2020, Hern's chief of staff Cameron Foster defended it to Fox 25: Hern "has been open and transparent with members of the community about his family business' need of a Paycheck Protection Program Loan during the COVID-19 crisis." Foster said the business kept all its employees at their current level or moved part-timers to full time, and that none of its employees had to file for unemployment.

Fine. Keeping people paid was the point of the program. Nobody needs to apologize for using relief during a shutdown.

The problem is what he said when other people got relief.

Step three: tell everyone else that debt forgiveness is theft

On August 24, 2022, Biden announced he would cancel up to $10,000 in federal student loan debt for borrowers earning under $125,000, and up to $20,000 for Pell Grant recipients.

Hern's reaction, as Tulsa's KTUL reported:

"To recap, in the last two weeks, the 'Party of the People' has supercharged the IRS to go after working-class Americans, raised their taxes, and forced them to pay for other people's college degrees."

"Forced them to pay for other people's college degrees."

Two years earlier, taxpayers had been forced to pay for his McDonald's payroll — under rules he'd helped shape — and the debt had been erased entirely.

The White House noticed. Its account quote-tweeted him with one line and the exact figure: Congressman Kevin Hern had $1,082,302 in PPP loans forgiven. It did the same to Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene ($183,504), Vern Buchanan ($2.3 million), Markwayne Mullin ($1.4 million), Mike Kelly ($987,237) and Matt Gaetz ($482,321), as Forbes reported. Those six posts were the six most popular tweets on the platform in that three-hour window.

Hern's answer, reported by Raw Story, was defiance:

"Very proud to have kept employees paid during the pandemic when businesses were forced to shut down at no fault of their own. Millions of small businesses across the country did the same. If the White House wants to attack that, I'll win that fight any day of the week."

Notice that this defense works just as well for the borrowers he was attacking. They also didn't cause the thing that put them underwater. They also kept paying what they could. They also didn't ask for a crisis.

The difference is that Hern got a seat at the table when the rules were written, and they didn't.

He's not alone, and that's the point

This is not a one-off. It's a pattern we keep running into.

In South Carolina, Ralph Norman called student debt relief "a special kind of idiocy" after his own companies had $608,500 wiped out. In Kentucky, Brett Guthrie ran the same play. In Pennsylvania, Mike Kelly — whose car dealerships had $987,237 forgiven — voted against even requiring PPP recipients to be disclosed.

What links them isn't hypocrisy for its own sake. It's a consistent idea about who deserves help: people who own things, and not people who owe things.

What that idea looks like when he's writing law

Hern's record makes the principle explicit, and he's been candid about it.

He sits on the Ways and Means Committee, which wrote the tax provisions of Trump's budget bill. Speaking at a Ways and Means Republican meeting while pushing to add work requirements to more safety-net programs, he described his vision of the American Dream: it "is not a destination. It is a place that you continue to work until you're not here anymore."

After voting for that bill's Medicaid cuts, he told a Tulsa Regional Chamber forum that he didn't know just how sweeping the impacts would be on local health care systems — then praised the new Medicaid work requirements anyway: "What we don't want to do is waste benefits on people who are able to take care of themselves."

Waste. That's the word for a Medicaid recipient.

Meanwhile his own finances kept him busy. He violated the STOCK Act in 2021, filing nearly two dozen July trades worth as much as $2.7 million weeks after the legal deadline — one of 45 Republicans on this site who broke that disclosure law. In March 2026, a NOTUS analysis found he appeared to be late again on between $4.2 million and $17.6 million in trades. His office's entire response was: "The filings aren't late."

Now he wants the Senate

Hern won Oklahoma's Republican Senate primary on June 16, 2026, with Trump's endorsement, to replace Markwayne Mullin — who, per the same White House thread, had $1.4 million of his own forgiven.

If he wins in November, he'll spend six years voting on who gets federal help and who doesn't.

We already know his answer. He told us in 2022. The government forgave $1,082,302 of his company's debt under rules he helped shape, and when it forgave $10,000 of a nurse's, he called that forcing working people to pay for other people's college degrees.