Newhouse: Congress seeks more money for small-business loans

YAKIMA — Rep. Dan Newhouse, R-Yakima, said Congress is working on authorizing more money for a program aimed at helping shuttered small businesses stay afloat during the COVID-19 outbreak.

“We’re working on a package to replenish these funds,” Newhouse said on Friday in an interview. “$251 billion is the figure that comes more often than any other.”

In the $2 trillion relief package passed by Congress and signed into law by President Donald J. Trump on March 27, Congress authorized $349 billion in loans backed by the Small Business Administration, or SBA, under the Paycheck Protection Program, or PPP, to businesses with 500 or fewer employees. Under the law, the portion of the loans used to pay employees will be forgiven.

In addition, Congress also approved $10 billion in the Economic Injury Disaster Loan, or EIDL, program. While the PPP loans were made through SBA banks, the EIDL loans were made directly by the SBA to qualifying businesses.

However, the money appropriated for both loan programs ran out last week.

Newhouse, who sponsored blood drives in Yakima, Kennewick and Moses Lake on Friday, said that Democrats in Congress, by asking for additional funds for hospitals as well as state and local governments, were holding up passage of additional funds for the PPP program.

“The Republicans want a clean bill,” he said. “Democrats would like to include other things that we do not see as immediate needs.”

Newhouse said that while those things are priorities, the funds intended to help governments and health care providers “are just fine” while approving new money for small-business lending was critical.

“We’re trying to be responsive to immediate needs,” he said. “Let’s just pass this simple, clean bill, and look at future needs as they arise.”

Charles H. Featherstone can be reached at [email protected].