Prosecutors need more time to deal with pandemic fraud. A top senator says Democrats are blocking a bill to give it to them.

• The deadline is approaching for prosecutors to file fraud charges related to $43 billion in pandemic aid spending.
• Senator Joni Ernst says her Democratic counterpart is blocking a bill to give them five more years.
• Watchdogs previously flagged the Shuttered Venue Operators Grant and a restaurant bailout fund.

The top Republican on the Senate Small Business Committee said Democrats are blocking a measure to give federal prosecutors more time to investigate bailouts for restaurants and the live-entertainment industry.

Senator Joni Ernst said Senator Ed Markey is holding up her bill that would give investigators until at least 2031 to file charges for defrauding the $28.6 billion Restaurant Revitalization Fund or the $14.5 billion Shuttered Venue Operators Grant program.

"We are not getting a lot of cooperation coming from our Ranking Member, Markey, and the Senate Democrats," Ernst told Business Insider. "I'm not very optimistic that it's going to happen, and it's very, very frustrating."

Markey's office declined to respond to a request for comment.

Less than two weeks remain for the Senate to pass the legislation, which would enable the bill to move to the president's desk and possibly be signed into law.

It's not clear whether Ernst has formally sought unanimous consent to pass the statute-of-limitations extender bill because the process can take place informally, off the Senate floor. It's possible the measure could be passed next year, though the deadline to prosecute some SVOG fraud cases could lapse as soon as April 8.

Business Insider documented how over $200 million from the SVOG program went to celebrities who used taxpayer money for private jets, lavish parties, luxury clothes, and other questionable spending.

Investigators haven't accused any of those recipients of wrongdoing, and most of the grants discussed in BI's stories were closed out by the Small Business Administration.

Mike Galdo, a former prosecutor who focused on pandemic fraud, said the bill could give agents, analysts, and prosecutors more time to build cases.

"Given some of the ambiguity in the language in the SVOG statute and regulations, as well as enforcement priorities other than fraud taking center stage for this Administration, it is unclear how many additional SVOG-related enforcement matters will be brought," he said in an email.

Ernst said Democrats preferred to "rant and rail" against President Donald Trump. At a committee hearing for SBA matters on December 10, Markey accused Republicans of waging "an all-out assault" on an SBA program that sets aside billions of dollars in federal contracts for small businesses owned by women and racial and ethnic minorities.

Christmas crunch time in Congress

A similar bill to extend the statute of limitations for the SVOG program and the restaurant fund has already passed the House of Representatives with bipartisan support.

Both Ernst and Markey have pointed fingers across the aisle for delaying their legislative priorities. Ernst yesterday sought unanimous consent to pass a bill that would have clawed back more than $65 billion in unspent COVID relief funds, a measure that was blocked by Senator Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat. And Markey blamed Republicans for blocking a one-year extension of two programs that dole out billions in grants to tech-oriented small businesses.

Representative Gil Cisneros, a Democratic congressman from California, said earlier this month that the SBA's inspector-general has 31 open Restaurant Revitalization Fund cases and six open Shuttered Venue Operators Grant cases.

A spokesman for the SBA's inspector-general's office didn't respond to a request for comment about those numbers.

The two programs cut checks of up to $10 million meant to support businesses that had been hard-hit by the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 and 2021, as waves of the deadly virus and government stay-at-home orders led businesses dependent on in-person gatherings to struggle.

Government auditors faulted the SBA over its internal controls, and the combined total of fraud and waste in those and other pandemic programs may exceed $400 billion. Prosecutions have barely scratched the surface compared to the scale of the suspected fraud, but some misspent money could also be recovered through administrative actions or civil lawsuits.