President Trump on Friday signed the nearly $500
billion “Phase 3.5” emergency interim coronavirus relief package into law after
Congress passed legislation this week replenishing the fund for small
businesses and adding billions of dollars in aid to hospitals across the
country amid the COVID-19 pandemic.
In an Oval Office ceremony, the
president touted the bill as being “great for small businesses” and “great for
the workers,” adding that the bill will “extend relief to thousands of
African-American and Hispanic American business owners."
The new interim emergency relief
package, which provides $484 billion in additional funding, passed the House on
Thursday and the Senate earlier this week.
The bill delivers a $310 billion
infusion to the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP), which helps businesses with
fewer than 500 employees obtain loans that can cover eight weeks of their
payroll, benefits and other expenses. Thirty billion of that is reserved for
community-based lenders, small banks and credit unions, and $30 billion is for
mid-sized banks and credit unions.
The bill also provided an additional
$50 billion for the Small Business Administration’s emergency disaster lending
and $10 billion in SBA disaster grants.
The PPP was created as part of
the more than $2.2 trillion “Phase 3” stimulus package, known as the CARES Act,
which passed last month. The program converts the small business loans to
grants and would be fully forgiven if 75 percent of the loan is used to keep
employees on the payroll.
The PPP ran out of funding earlier
this month, spurring Congress to pass the “Phase 3.5” relief package to
replenish the PPP funds and fund other programs.
Democrats had been pushing for
additional help for state and local governments that are running dry on
revenue during the pandemic, but Republicans refused. Democrats, instead,
secured $75 billion for health care providers to support COVID-19 expenses and
lost revenue due to the canceling of many elected procedures. And the package
includes $25 billion to develop mass testing, with $11 billion earmarked for
states and localities.
Meanwhile,
a Trump administration official told Fox News on Friday that the Small
Business Administration could begin taking loan applications again
next week through the Paycheck Protection Program for small businesses slammed
by the coronavirus-related economic freeze. The SBA could begin taking these
applications as early as Monday, Fox News has learned.
The interim emergency spending bill
comes as the U.S. continues to grapple with the coronavirus crisis, and as
state governors begin considering when to reopen their economies.
As of Friday, the U.S. reported more
than 869,000 positive cases of COVID-19 across the country and more than 50,000
deaths.
During the signing ceremony at the
White House, the president went on to applaud the task force work on the
coronavirus response, saying the U.S. is making “thousands and thousands of
ventilators,” creating an excess which will allow the U.S. to make donations to
other countries.
Vice President Pence, who leads the
coronavirus task force, said the U.S. has conducted more than 5 million tests,
which the president touted as being more than any other country.
The president went on to note the
importance of “borders” and work on the wall along the U.S.-Mexico border.
“A country has to have borders,”
Trump said. “And you don’t have borders if you have people pouring in by the
tens of thousands.”
Brooke
Singman is a Politics Reporter for Fox News. Follow her on Twitter at @BrookeSingman.
