Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Thomas-Greenfield OK’d
The Senate confirmed President Joe Biden’s choice to lead U.S. diplomacy at the United Nations on Tuesday.
WASHINGTON — The Senate confirmed President Joe Biden’s choice to lead U.S. diplomacy at the United Nations on Tuesday. Linda Thomas-Greenfield’s confirmation reflected the Biden administration’s determination to reengage with the world body and former President Donald Trump’s diplomacy that often left the U.S. isolated internationally.
Senators voted 78-20 to confirm Thomas-Greenfield to the post, which will be a Cabinet-level position.
Also Tuesday, the Senate voted 92-7 to confirm Tom Vilsack as agriculture secretary, his second run at the Cabinet post. The former Iowa governor spent eight years leading the department for former President Barack Obama’s administration.
In his testimony, Vilsack endorsed boosting climatefriendly agricultural industries such as the creation of biofuels, saying, “Agriculture is one of our first and best ways to get some wins (on climate change).”
With systemic racial inequity now a nationwide talking point, Vilsack also envisioned creating an “equity taskforce” inside the department. Its job, he said, would be to identify what he called “intentional or unintentional barriers” that prevent or discourage farmers of color from properly accessing federal assistance programs.
Thomas-Greenfield, a retired 35-year veteran of the foreign service who resigned during the Trump administration, will be the third African American, and the second Black woman, to hold the job. Her confirmation was hailed by Democrats and advocates of the United Nations, who had lamented the Trump administration’s unilateral approach to international affairs.
“This confirmation sends a message that the United States is back and that our foreign service is back,” said Rep. Karen Bass, D-Calif., who chairs a House Foreign Affairs subcommittee on Africa, global health and global human rights. “We as a country and as a world are safer with Linda Thomas-Greenfield serving as the United States ambassador to the United Nations.”
Republicans who opposed her said she was soft on China and would not stand up for U.S. principles at the United Nations.
Thomas-Greenfield had rejected those concerns during her confirmation hearing, telling senators that a 2019 speech she gave to the Chinesefunded Confucius Institute had been a mistake and was not intended to be an endorsement of Chinese government policies. In the speech, she had praised China’s $1 trillion Belt and Road global infrastructure program in Africa and called for “a win-win-win situation” where the U.S. and China would promote good governance and the rule of law.
She told senators that China is a strategic adversary and that “their actions threaten our security, they threaten our values and they threaten our way of life, and they are a threat to their neighbors and they are a threat across the globe.”
She spoke of China’s diplomatic inroads during the Trump administration, which pursued an “America First” policy that weakened international alliances. She made clear there would be a change under Biden to reengage internationally and promote American values.
She stressed that U.S. leadership must be rooted in the country’s values — “support for democracy, respect for universal human rights, and the promotion of peace and security.” She said effective diplomacy means developing “robust relationships,” finding common ground and managing differences, and “doing genuine, old-fashioned, people-to-people diplomacy.”
The problems plaguing those seeking loans from the government’s revived small-business relief program have ranged from simple to shocking.
Some applications were stalled for weeks by typos. Overzealous fraud filters trapped others. A change of taxpayer identification rules snarled many freelancers and sole proprietors. And then there were the thousands of people turned down because they erroneously registered as having a recent criminal conviction.
Six weeks into the second run of the Paycheck Protection Program, $134 billion in emergency aid has been distributed by banks, which make the government-backed loans, to 1.8 million small businesses. But a thicket of errors and technology glitches has slowed the relief effort and vexed borrowers and lenders alike.
Some are run-of-the-mill challenges magnified by the immense demand for loans, which has overwhelmed customer service representatives. But many stem from new data checks added by the Small Business Administration to combat fraud and eliminate unqualified applicants.
When the Paycheck Protection Program began last year, the Trump administration — eager to get money out the door as quickly as possible — eliminated most of the safeguards that normally accompany business loans. With applications approved almost instantly, thieves and ineligible borrowers siphoned billions of dollars from the $523 billion the program distributed last year.
In December, Congress approved $284 billion for a new round of lending, including second loans to the hardest-hit businesses. This time, the Small Business Administration was determined to crack down. Instead of approving applications from banks immediately, it held them for a day or two to verify some of the information.
Nearly 5% of the 5.2 million loans made last year had “anomalies,” the agency revealed last month, ranging from minor mistakes like typos to major ones like ineligibility. Even tiny mistakes can spiral into bureaucratic disasters.
In June, Shelly Ross got a $67,500 loan through the program from PayPal for Tales of the Kitty, her San Francisco cat-sitting business. She applied last month for a second loan, but her application sat, stuck in an error queue, for more than a week. Her attempts to reach someone on PayPal’s jammed customer service phone line went nowhere.
Impatient, Ross put in applications at three other lenders, but each was rejected or left in limbo. Finally, PayPal got back to her with an explanation: Her loan in June was issued under an incorrect employer identification number. The company fixed the mistake, and Ross assumed her loan was imminent — until a new problem arose.
Before taking the PayPal loan in June, Ross had accepted, and then returned, a loan made in April by a different lender. That loan still shows up as active in the Small Business Administration’s system, making it look as if she double-dipped last year, which is forbidden.
Ross has sent multiple emails to the Small Business Administration’s customer service address describing her quandary. After two weeks, she received a generic response instructing her to direct questions to her lender.
Matthew Coleman, an agency spokesperson, declined to comment on individual cases like Ross’. The Small Business Administration “continues to follow through with its commitment to improve resolutions of data mismatches and eligibility concerns,” he said.