Yellow Trucking is on the verge of bankruptcy, which really isn’t news considering the company has been teetering on the edge for years. Few of them, however, got a $700 million pandemic “loan” from the Trump Administration that granted the government 30% ownership of the company.
But wait: it gets better. A year prior to the federal government making a “Shark Tank”-style investment, a friend of Jared Kushner’s sunk a $600 million investment in the company–the same friend who loaned Kushner’s family’s real estate company a $184 million loan in 2019 AND the same friend who was awarded with a seat on a White House council.
According to the New York Times, Yellow may file bankruptcy within months as the company still struggles with exploding costs, a cash crunch, and lingering debt while it’s facing a potential Teamsters strike. With 30,000 employees, Yellow’s bankruptcy wouldn’t likely halt operations, but it could impact a recovering supply chain as contractors and clients see how things shake out and look for other, potentially more stable options.
When it happens, Trump can add this bankruptcy to his list of failures because if it wasn’t for his and Kushner’s intervention, the government would have never had a 30% stake in the company. The company–then known as YRC–was ineligible for government loans because it had been accused of overbilling the Pentagon for shipping items under its contract. In 2022, the Biden Administration agreed to a settlement with YRC in which the company repaid more than $6 million in illegal overcharges it added to federal invoices from 2005 to 2013.