This afternoon, April 23, 2020, the House of Representatives passed House Resolution 266, also known as the Phase 3.5 Coronavirus Stimulus Package. The bill will now be sent to President Donald Trump who has said that he will sign it into law. Companies who did not have an opportunity to apply for PPP loans before the banks stopped accepting applications should get their applications ready to submit, perhaps as early as later tonight after the President has signed the bill.

This bill adds approximately $311 billion to the Paycheck Protection Program, adds $60 billion to the SBA Disaster Loan Program and provides $75 billion for hospitals, $25 billion for testing and $11 billion for administration. The total funds provided are just short of $484 billion and bring the grand total allocated to COVID-19 Relief to just under $4 trillion dollars. These numbers add to $482 billion and are close approximations, but not exact.

The funds devoted to the PPP restrict $60 billion of the total to be used by smaller lenders who typically work with businesses that are not customers of traditional SBA lending banks. This is in response to the practice of the banks giving preference to their customers in processing loans. It appears that the practice of favoring customers was in response to banking regulations.

While the funds from the original CARES Act had all been committed, the loans had not all been funded. One of our members announced to us this afternoon that he had received his PPP funds today. The SBA has also advised that the volume of loan applications submitted for the disaster recovery program had made it impossible for the SBA to fund all of the loans for which it had applications.