Thursday’s order comes in connection to a lawsuit five media organizations filed in May over a lack of transparency in the loan programs. The Washington Post, The New York Times, Bloomberg, Dow Jones and ProPublica requested the data under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) the previous month, to no avail.
The SBA argued that disclosing the names of loan recipients could violate their privacy because PPP loans are tailored to the size of a business’s payroll.
