The Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) was a key component of the United States’
economic policy response to the COVID-19 pandemic and the related economic crisis,
offering forgivable loans to small businesses to aid them in retaining their employees. In
this article, we theorize and examine the PPP as a “public money,” performing a mixedmethods analysis of news articles covering the PPP from mainstream and partisan sources
between March and July 2020. We focus on three areas of controversy over the PPP in this
coverage: the intended beneficiaries of PPP funds, the overlap between PPP and expanded
unemployment insurance in paying workers, and the boundaries of which organizations
were “small businesses” meriting PPP forgivable loans. We trace how these controversies
evolved through continuous redefinition of the core problem of PPP. We demonstrate how
journalistic coverage constructs public monies such as the PPP.