The SBA Gave $312 Million in Pandemic Loans to Children Under 11 and $

The SBA Gave $312 Million in Pandemic Loans to Children Under 11 and $333 Million to People Over 115 Years Old

Posted: February 8, 2026 - 11:45 AM ET | NEW

There are government failures, and then there are government failures that make you question whether anyone at any level of the federal bureaucracy has ever used a calculator, looked at a calendar, or possessed even the most rudimentary understanding of how human aging works. The Department of Government Efficiency just revealed that between 2020 and 2021, the SBA approved 5,593 loans totaling $312 million to borrowers whose only listed owner was 11 years old or younger at the time the loan was granted.

Eleven. Years. Old. Fifth graders. Children who cannot legally sign a contract, open a bank account, or buy a lottery ticket were apparently running small businesses sophisticated enough to qualify for six-figure federal pandemic relief loans. And the SBA, the agency whose entire job is evaluating business loan applications, said "looks good, here is your money."

        5,593 PPP and EIDL loans totaling $312 million went to borrowers listed as 11 years old or younger. Another 3,095 loans totaling $333 million went to borrowers listed as over 115 years old. One recipient was supposedly 157 years old. The SBA approved all of them.

    

But Wait, It Gets Worse: The 157-Year-Old Entrepreneur

If the child loans made you spit out your coffee, buckle up. DOGE also found that the SBA issued 3,095 loans totaling $333 million to borrowers who were listed as over 115 years old at the time of the loan. One hundred and fifteen. For context, the oldest verified person in the world right now is 116. The United States has approximately 100,000 centenarians, and exactly zero of them have reached 115.

But the SBA did not let biological reality stop them. One loan recipient was listed as being 157 years old. Born in 1863, during the Civil War. Abraham Lincoln was president. The Emancipation Proclamation had just been signed. And apparently, after surviving 157 years of American history including two world wars, the Great Depression, and the invention of the internet, this individual needed a $36,000 PPP loan to keep their small business afloat during COVID.

Nobody at the SBA looked at that application and thought, "Hmm, this person was born before the telephone was invented. Maybe we should double-check this." Nobody flagged it. Nobody questioned it. The system processed it, approved it, and sent the money. Because the system had no age validation whatsoever. It literally never occurred to anyone at the SBA that you might want to check whether a loan applicant is actually alive, let alone whether they were born in the same century as the rest of us.

The "Basic Sanity Check" That Took Six Years

DOGE's fix for this? They announced that SBA loan applications will now require applicants to input their date of birth, and direct loans will no longer be available to anyone under 18 or over 120 years old. DOGE described this as "basic sanity checks" that represent "initial steps toward minimizing fraud in government payment programs."

Basic. Sanity. Checks. They are calling it a basic sanity check. As if requiring a date of birth on a federal loan application is some revolutionary innovation in fraud prevention. As if the technology to verify whether someone is a living adult human being did not exist in 2020. It absolutely existed. Every bank in America does it. Every credit card company does it. Your cell phone carrier does it when you sign up for a data plan. But the United States Small Business Administration, charged with distributing over a trillion dollars in emergency pandemic relief, did not think to ask borrowers how old they were.

And now, six years after the fraud happened, after $645 million went to people who were either too young to ride a roller coaster or too old to have a pulse, they have implemented the groundbreaking reform of... adding a date of birth field. Slow clap for government efficiency.

        DOGE's revolutionary solution: SBA loans now require a date of birth, and applicants must be between 18 and 120 years old. This "basic sanity check" took six years, $645 million in fraud, and a presidential executive order to implement. Every bank in America already does this.

    

$645 Million: The Combined Cost of Not Checking IDs

Let us add up the damage. $312 million to children. $333 million to centenarian ghosts. That is $645 million in federal pandemic relief that went to people who either do not exist or cannot legally enter into a contract. That money is gone. It is not coming back. The children did not spend it because they were not real business owners. The 115-year-olds did not spend it because they were not real people. Someone spent it. Someone collected $645 million by typing fake birthdates into a government form that never bothered to verify them.

For perspective, $645 million is more than the entire annual budget of the SBA's Office of Inspector General. It is more than the $435 million DOGE claims it will save by firing 43% of the SBA's workforce. The agency is cutting 2,700 jobs to save money while simultaneously admitting it handed out $645 million to fictitious borrowers because it did not have a date-of-birth field on its application.

If you are a legitimate small business owner who struggled to get your PPP loan approved, who jumped through hoop after hoop of documentation requirements, who waited weeks for funding while your business hemorrhaged cash, imagine how you feel knowing that a fictional 157-year-old Civil War survivor got approved before you did. Imagine knowing that children too young to drive got federal business loans while your application was stuck in processing. The system was not just broken. The system did not exist.

The Uncomfortable Question Nobody Wants to Answer

Here is what DOGE is not saying, and what nobody in Washington wants to talk about: if the SBA could not verify whether a borrower was alive or of legal age, what else did they not verify? Did they verify that the businesses existed? Did they verify the payroll numbers? Did they verify the employee counts? Did they verify anything at all, or did they just hand out a trillion dollars based on whatever people typed into an online form?

The answer, as we now know from the 111,620 California suspensions, the 6,900 Minnesota suspensions, and the countless fraud prosecutions rolling through federal courts, is: no. They verified almost nothing. The PPP and EIDL programs were designed to get money out fast, and they succeeded spectacularly at that. They also succeeded at creating the single largest fraud event in the history of the United States government, and the $645 million in loans to children and dead people is just the most absurd visible tip of an iceberg that goes all the way to the ocean floor.

The SBA gave $312 million to children and $333 million to people who were likely deceased. Their fix, six years later, is to add a date of birth field and set an age limit of 18 to 120. The fact that a 120-year-old can still technically qualify tells you everything you need to know about how seriously the federal government takes fraud prevention. They went from no age check to a check that accommodates borrowers born in 1906. Progress.