Duarte Businesses Got $6.1 Million in Pandemic Loans. John Duarte Said COVID Aid That “Paid People to Stay Home” Had to End.

“These COVID support regimes that have paid people to stay home and not work have got to wind out immediately, and we’ve got to get back to normal,” John Duarte said in an interview on the Trent Loos Podcast. “When you pay them not to work and then you ruin the job market through taxation and limitations on business, no wonder people aren’t coming to work.”

His family’s business took a different kind of COVID support. In 2020 and 2021, Duarte Nursery and three companies where John Duarte has held leadership roles received $6,116,394 in federal Paycheck Protection Program loans, according to Small Business Administration data.

How PPP worked

Congress created PPP in 2020 to help businesses keep workers on the payroll during the pandemic. A loan spent on payroll and certain other costs could be forgiven, meaning it never had to be repaid; a forgiven loan worked, in effect, like a grant. SBA records list all five Duarte-linked loans as “paid in full or forgiven.” The records do not say which.

PPP differed from the aid Duarte described in the interview: it paid employers to keep people working rather than paying people who had stopped working. Both were federal pandemic relief.

The loans

Duarte Nursery received two loans totaling $5,785,457: $3,785,457 approved April 15, 2020, and $2,000,000 approved April 1, 2021, both through Yosemite Farm Credit. The company reported 308 jobs retained on the first loan and 280 on the second.

Three smaller companies received about $331,000 more. Peacock Nuts LLC, a tree nut farming company at the same Hughson address as Duarte Nursery, received $273,537 on April 21, 2021. Two research companies that share a registered address in Los Alamos, N.M., received loans on April 29, 2020: Innate Immunity LLC ($44,900) and Immunological Solutions Inc. ($12,500). John Duarte’s House financial disclosures list his roles in all three: member (2022) and chief executive officer (2023) of Peacock Nuts, and director of both Innate Immunity and Immunological Solutions. The disclosures do not list the companies’ locations, so the two Los Alamos loans are matched by company name.

Alexandra Duarte, a Republican, is running for California State Senate District 4 on the Nov. 3, 2026 ballot. She is married to former Rep. John Duarte, who has served as the nursery’s president.