Mike Kelly Corruption & EthicsEducation Pennsylvania

Mike Kelly Took $974,100 in Taxpayer Loans. Six Weeks Later He Voted to Keep the List Secret.

Four of Mike Kelly's car dealerships got pandemic loans in the first two weeks of the program. In May 2020 he voted against a bill making the government publish who got the money. All $974,100 was later wiped out — $987,237 with interest. He calls student debt relief a 'handout.'

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Mike Kelly Took $974,100 in Taxpayer Loans. Six Weeks Later He Voted to Keep the List Secret.

In April 2020, the federal government started handing out emergency loans to keep small businesses alive. The program was called the Paycheck Protection Program, and the money came from us — the taxpayers.

Four car dealerships owned by Mike Kelly, the congressman from Pennsylvania's 16th District, got in line early. Very early.

That's $974,100. Every single dollar was later forgiven. With the interest that piled up on top, the amount wiped clean was $987,237.

Nobody paid it back. It was our money, and it stayed gone.

He got in during the round that ran dry

Timing matters here, so look at the dates again. All four loans were approved between April 10 and April 13, 2020.

The program was funded with $349 billion, and by April 16 the entire pot was empty — less than three weeks after the CARES Act was signed, leaving what the Urban Institute described as "many struggling applicants without cash assistance." Restaurants, barbershops, and corner stores across western Pennsylvania filled out the paperwork and got nothing, because the money was already spoken for.

Four dealerships owned by a sitting member of Congress were not among the ones left waiting. Every one of them was approved with days to spare.

Then he voted to keep the list secret

On May 28, 2020 — six weeks after his dealerships got their money — the House voted on a bill called the TRUTH Act. It was simple. It would have required the Small Business Administration to publish the name of every business that received one of these loans, so the public could see where hundreds of billions of dollars actually went.

Kelly voted no.

The bill came up under a rule requiring a two-thirds majority, so it failed even though a big majority backed it: 269 in favor, 147 against. Every Democrat who voted, voted yes. Kelly was one of 146 Republicans who voted no.

He was not the only one with a personal stake in that vote. The news site Sludge went through the loan records and found that ten Republicans whose own private companies had taken this money voted against the disclosure bill — Ralph Norman, Brett Guthrie, Vicki Hartzler, Kevin Hern, Rick Allen, Greg Pence, Devin Nunes, Markwayne Mullin, Roger Williams, and Mike Kelly.

Sludge also put Kelly's net worth at $10.4 million.

We've written about what Brett Guthrie did with his — $4.4 million forgiven for a company he helps run, from a congressman who called student debt relief "a bribe to score political points." It's the same story with a different last name.

The list came out anyway. A judge had to force it.

Kelly's vote didn't end the fight over disclosure; it just moved it to court.

The SBA released borrower names in July 2020 but withheld the precise amounts on the bigger loans, putting them in broad ranges instead. Five news organizations — the Washington Post, the New York Times, Bloomberg, Dow Jones and ProPublica — sued under the Freedom of Information Act. A federal judge ruled against the government, and on December 2, 2020, the SBA finally published the names, addresses and exact loan amounts.

That is the only reason you can read the four numbers at the top of this page. Kelly voted for you not to have them. The courts overruled him.

"PPP loans are designed to be forgiven. Student loans are not."

Here's where it stops being about one bad vote and starts being about what Mike Kelly actually believes.

When President Biden moved to cancel some student loan debt in August 2022, Kelly was furious. He tweeted that asking "plumbers and carpenters to pay off the loans of Wall Street advisors and lawyers isn't just unfair" — it's "also bad policy."

The White House replied with a single sentence: "Congressman Mike Kelly had $987,237 in PPP loans forgiven."

Kelly fired back:

"A Democrat governor declared my family's business non-essential and shut our doors. This money saved over 160 essential jobs in Western Pennsylvania during the pandemic. PPP loans are designed to be forgiven. Student loans are not. Big difference!"

Read that last part again, because it's the whole argument and it falls apart on contact.

PPP loans are "designed to be forgiven" because Congress designed them that way. Congress wrote the rules. Congress decided that this particular kind of debt, owed by this particular kind of borrower, would be cancelled at taxpayer expense. Kelly was in Congress the whole time.

There is no law of nature that says a car dealership's debt gets erased and a nurse's doesn't. That's a choice somebody made. Kelly likes the choice when it lands on him.

He didn't stop there, either. In February 2023, he joined 127 House Republicans on a Supreme Court brief to kill Biden's plan, and put out a press release bragging about it:

"From the onset, I have voiced my strong opposition to the Biden administration's student loan handout. Make no mistake: this unconstitutional act is nothing more than a political ploy that will ultimately cost taxpayers approximately $400 billion."

A "handout" that "will cost taxpayers." He was describing his own dealerships.

And in October 2023, when Biden cancelled $9 billion in debt for 125,000 borrowers, Kelly went at it again: "No student loan is forgiven. The debt is just transferred onto the backs of the American taxpayers." The White House replied by posting the same number a second time.

That second sentence is a precise description of his own $987,237.

The number of jobs keeps growing

One more detail worth noticing. In 2022 Kelly said the money saved "over 160 essential jobs." A year later he said it saved "nearly 200."

The federal paperwork says something else. Add up the "jobs reported" on all four loan applications and you get 147 — 52 at the Chevrolet store, 42 at the Automotive Group, 29 at Hyundai, and 24 at the LP.

The figure he quotes in public has gone up by about a third. The figure his businesses filed with the government has stayed where it is.

"I have made no decisions in this business since 2011"

Kelly's defense in 2020 was that this had nothing to do with him. His son Brendan runs the dealerships and handled the loan application. "I have made no decisions in this business since 2011," he told KDKA. Asked whether being a congressman got the loans special treatment, he said, "No, absolutely not."

His spokesman told Keystone Newsroom that Kelly was "not part of the discussions between the business and the PPP lender" — the same outlet that noted Kelly ranked as the 46th wealthiest member of Congress in 2018.

Fine. Take him at his word about the application.

It does not explain the vote. Nobody's son cast that ballot on May 28, 2020. Kelly did, personally, on the House floor, six weeks after nearly a million taxpayer dollars landed in businesses that carry his name. And it doesn't square with the way he talks about those businesses the moment he's defending them — "my family's business," "our doors," "our family business."

He's hands-off when the question is a conflict of interest and hands-on when the question is credit.

It is also not the last time a Kelly family financial transaction would end up in front of investigators. In July 2025 the House Ethics Committee voted unanimously to formally reprove him over his wife's purchase of Cleveland-Cliffs stock the day after he learned the company's Butler plant would be saved — we laid that one out in full here. The committee didn't punish him for the trade. It punished him for how he answered questions about it.

He is not alone in Pennsylvania, either. Just up the road, Rob Bresnahan sold up to $130,000 in Medicaid stock and then voted to cut Medicaid.

Meanwhile, in the 16th District

While Kelly was calling debt relief for working people a handout, here's what was happening to the people he represents.

The budget bill he helped write as chairman of the Ways and Means Tax Subcommittee is projected to knock 27,016 people in PA-16 off their health coverage, according to the Joint Economic Committee. In the same district, 53,616 households rely on SNAP to buy groceries — about one household in six, including more than 20,000 with a senior in the home.

Those people asked for help too. Nobody wiped their debt clean.

We deserve better

Strip away the tweets and it's four facts in a row:

  1. Kelly's businesses took $974,100 in taxpayer money in the opening days of a program whose entire $349 billion was gone by April 16.
  2. Six weeks later he voted to stop the public from finding out who got that money.
  3. All of it was forgiven — $987,237 with interest.
  4. He has spent the years since calling the same kind of relief, offered to nurses and teachers and mechanics, a "handout" that costs taxpayers.

You can believe the Paycheck Protection Program was good policy. Plenty of people do; it kept paychecks coming during a shutdown nobody chose. But you cannot believe it was good policy and that forgiving a working person's loan is a scam. They are the same act of government. The only thing that changes is who's holding the note.

We deserve a representative who applies the same rule to himself that he applies to us.

Sources

Photo: Official congressional portrait, via Wikimedia Commons.

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