What Led Me to Write the Hill Op-Ed on Pandemic Loans

Estimated reading time: 6 minutes

How SBA’s EIDL Pandemic Loans Broke Businesses

I wrote a Hill op-ed on January 17, 2026, about how the SBA’s EIDL loans broke small businesses after reading thousands of heartbreaking stories. These were families and owners who did exactly what they were told in 2020 and still lost everything. They applied for emergency capitalization in good faith during a national disaster. They kept employees on payroll. They waited for a recovery that never came.

The Math Never Worked

I did not set out to write an op-ed about pandemic loans. I recognized a pattern seen before and knew what happens when it goes unexamined. That recognition came from experience. Over the past few years, I began paying closer attention to what happened after pandemic relief ended. As repayment began, small business owners started sharing their stories publicly. The details differed, but the outcomes were strikingly similar. Revenue never fully returned. Interest continued to accrue. Repayment obligations grew faster than cash flow could recover.

These businesses were not failing because of reckless decisions. Many failed because the financial structure they were placed in could not sustain itself over time. One account stayed with me. A business owner described sitting at the kitchen table, paperwork spread out, realizing that even if sales improved, the loan balance would still outlive the company. The business survived the shutdown. It could not survive the structure meant to save it. That feeling was familiar.

A Pattern I Had Seen Before

Back in 2005, as a business owner, I noticed something that did not make sense in the credit card payment system. Beginning in the early 2000s, millions of merchants, including ScanMyPhotos, began receiving two letters each year announcing increases in merchant credit card interchange fees. One came from Visa. One came from Mastercard. They often arrived on the same day. The language was nearly identical. The price increases were identical! Interchange fees are the electronic payment transactional fees that merchants pay every time a customer uses a credit or debit card. The fees are set by card networks and banks and deducted from each sale. Visa and Mastercard were widely understood to be competitors. Yet their pricing moved in parallel.

That stopped me cold.

When I looked more closely, I learned that the same major banks owned both networks. At the time, Visa and Mastercard operated as bank-owned associations. Their boards were composed of representatives from those same banks. Structurally, the networks were not independent of one another, even though they appeared to be. Those facts became central to a nationwide antitrust challenge. ScanMyPhotos became the lead plaintiff in In re Payment Card Interchange Fee and Merchant Discount Antitrust Litigation (MDL No. 1720). In my case, as lead plaintiff, along with many others, we alleged that interchange fees were set through coordinated conduct (anticompetitive collusion and price fixing) rather than through genuine competition.

The litigation led Visa and Mastercard to go public, switch to independent boards of directors, implement governance changes, increase transparency, and ultimately reach a $5.54 billion settlement with U.S. merchants. It helped millions of small businesses recover money they were owed, and it remains one of the most meaningful outcomes of my professional life.

But the lasting lesson was not about the lawsuit itself. It was about structure.

When Design Fails, Not Intent

Large systems do not need malicious intent to cause harm. Damage often arises from designs that appear reasonable at the outset but fail once real-world economics are applied over time. That lesson stayed with me. So when I examined pandemic loan repayment terms, timelines, and small business survival data, the pattern reappeared. The programs were created quickly during a genuine emergency. Speed mattered. Survival mattered. How could the government provide immediate liquidity to save the economy and millions of businesses? The SBA’s EIDL loans were the “solution.” But once repayment begins, assumptions stop being theoretical.

Roughly 90 percent of small businesses do not last thirty years. Many do not reach ten. When repayment schedules stretch across decades, the problem is not borrower behavior. It is math.

As I wrote in the Hill’s op-ed, “That outcome is not borrower misconduct. It is arithmetic.”

Why I Spoke Up Now

I did not write the piece assigning blame to the SBA’s EIDL loans for breaking small businesses. I wrote it because, once repayment began, the consequences of the loan design became measurable and unavoidable. Constant deferments are not relief. They are a warning sign.

No responsible lender, public or private, designs loans with terms its own data show most borrowers cannot meet. When that happens at scale, the result is not a relief program. It is a slow-motion credit trap that will outlive the firms it was meant to sustain. Ignoring patterns does not make them disappear. It only delays their impact. That recognition led me to write the Hill op-ed, and that is why I am speaking now.

“That is not borrower misconduct. It is arithmetic.”
“The math never worked.”
“The result is not a relief program. It is a slow-motion credit trap that will outlive the firms it was meant to sustain.”
“Constant deferments are not relief. They are a warning sign.”
“No responsible lender, public or private, designs loans on terms its own data show most borrowers cannot meet.”

The full op-ed was published in The Hill [10 AM (PT) January 17, 2026]. You can read it here.

Mitch Goldstone is the CEO of ScanMyPhotos.com, a California-based photo scanning service founded in 1990. Since 2005, he has served as lead plaintiff in a 20-year merchant interchange payment card class action lawsuit, which resulted in a $5.54 billion settlement benefiting millions of U.S. merchants. The Hill is a leading Washington publication read daily by lawmakers, regulators, policy staff, and national media. Its opinion pieces often shape political debate and influence how issues are discussed inside Congress and federal agencies.