Nearly one hundred banks bailed out by the federal government are on the verge of collapse, the Wall Street Journal reports. The ninety-eight banks received a combined total of more than $4.2 billion in taxpayer bailouts from the United States Treasury.

When TARP was created in the heat of the financial crisis, government officials said it would help only healthy banks. The depth of today’s problems for some of the institutions, however, suggests that a number of them were in parlous shape from the beginning.

Seven TARP recipients have already failed, resulting in more than $2.7 billion in lost TARP funds. Most of the troubled TARP recipients are small, plagued by wayward lending programs from which they might not recover. The median size of the 98 banks was $439 million in assets as of Sept. 30. The median TARP infusion for each was $10 million, federal filings show.