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After saying they were in no hurry to act on another coronavirus bill and chiding House lawmakers for being absent from Washington, Senate Republicans were poised Thursday to execute an about-face of sorts and pass legislation easing loan conditions for the Paycheck Protection Program.
It was unclear how well the legislation — which supporters hoped to pass on the Senate floor without even needing a vote — would sync up with a similar proposal in the House expected to be considered next week.
But the move, coming after Democrats had criticized Republicans for inaction and new data showed more than two million new claimants for jobless benefits, indicates Senate Republicans are feeling the political heat for their stance favoring a pause in legislation to assess how well aid from earlier bills is working.
Sen. Marco Rubio, the Florida Republican who largely designed the PPP in March, told reporters at the U.S. Capitol he was unsure whether it would pass Thursday. “I expect us to offer it and what seems to be a pretty broad agreement, but you just never know when you ask 100 people’s opinion whether one is going to object to it for potentially unrelated reasons,” Rubio said.
Under the PPP, small businesses are able to get their loan amount forgiven if they maintain the same number of employees and do not cut their pay by more than 25% for eight weeks after the loan is made. Rubio said his bill would increase that time to 16 weeks in total. That would give businesses additional time to wait for local COVID-19 lockdowns to end before trying to call workers back.
The PPP, which aims to help small businesses hurt by the coronavirus crisis, was established in late March and has received $670 billion in funding through the $2.2 trillion CARES Act and April’s $484 billion relief package.
Restaurant executives on Monday pressed President Donald Trump to extend the deadline to 24 weeks from eight weeks, and he said their request was “very reasonable.”
Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin talked up an extension on Thursday in a live interview with The Hill, saying “that’s something we definitely want to fix — doesn’t cost us any more money and there is bipartisan support.” But he signaled he remains opposed to doing away with a rule that requires that 75% of a PPP loan’s proceeds go toward payroll expenses.
“Let me just remind people — it’s called the Paycheck Protection Program. It’s not called the Overhead Protection Program,” Mnuchin said. “We believe that the 75% was exactly consistent with the way the program was designed.”
House Democrats’ sweeping $3 trillion aid package that passed Friday includes an extension, an elimination of the 75% rule and other changes to the PPP, but that broad measure is overall a non-starter for Republican lawmakers.
Democratic Rep. Dean Phillips of Minnesota, who has co-sponsored the stand-alone House bill targeting the PPP with GOP Rep. Chip Roy of Texas, said last week that he agreed to vote for House Democrats’ $3 trillion package in part because he got a commitment that there would be a vote on his measure. Phillips and Roy’s bill is called the Paycheck Protection Flexibility Act, and it includes an extension, an elimination of the 75% rule and other changes.
Adding to pressure, the Labor Department Thursday morning reported there were more than 2.4 million new applications for unemployment assistance last week, bringing the total since virus-related lockdowns began in mid-March to more than 35 million.
Republican senators had planned to head home without considering any additional legislation, a stance some said was encouraged by Trump in his lunch meeting with them Tuesday. Earlier Thursday, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, a Kentucky Republican, had teased House Democrats about being absent this week, offering to send his colleagues to the other side of the Capitol “to collect their newspapers and water the plants.”
But cracks in Republicans’ party solidarity began to appear late Wednesday when Sen. Cory Gardner of Colorado and Sen. Susan Collins of Maine said they would object to leaving for the weeklong Memorial Day break today unless their was action on a coronavirus bill.
Collins and Gardner are considered to have among the toughest routes to reelection this year.
“We’ve got more work to do. This is a major change if we get the agreement, but you know, we’re close,” Gardner said of the new PPP push.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Thursday she was confident McConnell would move a broader bill, though she did not say when. “I think he will. I think he wants to put some things on the table,” she said.
MarketWatch’s Victor Reklaitis contributed to this report.
