The panoply of economic support measures prompted by the pandemic have been the subject of controversy from the moment they were enacted, almost all of it to do with whether the government was being too generous to working families. There was one program that largely escaped this hand-wringing and criticism, though: the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP), meant to prop businesses up through the restrictions and disruptions of the pandemic via forgivable federal loans.

It’s interesting that it has, because a recent analysis by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) has found the program was everything Washington lawmakers and officials have cited to justify dragging their feet on measures like canceling student debt or stimulus checks: it was un-targeted, inefficient, and regressive, distributing money overwhelmingly to upper-income earners.

While ostensibly meant to subsidize workers’ incomes, the majority of the PPP money didn’t go to paychecks, with between 66 and 77 percent flowing to business owners and stakeholders like creditors and suppliers, according to the report, produced by ten economists from the Federal Reserve, MIT, and other entities. The result is that a little less than three-quarters of the $510 billion given out via the program in 2020, or $365.9 billion, went to the top income quintile of households, with the bottom quintile receiving only $13.2 billion.