There is a lot of PPP money left

And time is getting short.

One of the areas where the American Rescue Plan actually pulls back from previous coronavirus relief bills is on small business grants. There’s a roughly $25 billion fund for independent restaurants in there, and $15 billion in grants for businesses in low-income areas. And it funds a Community Navigator program to help smaller businesses access relief. But there’s nothing like the hundreds of billions of dollars that has funneled through the Paycheck Protection Program so far. That means the Biden team can turn its attention to implementation, which could be better at this stage.

The current round of forgivable loans ends March 31—again, I still do not understand why there’s an end date on these programs—and to date, PPP has furnished $687 billion in loans to 7.5 million recipients. Another 250,000 applications are under review.

Most of the loans in this round have been “second draws,” from businesses that previously got a loan and seen serious drops in income. About $164 billion has gone out since the reauthorization in the December relief bill. That’s out of $284 billion available. So a little more than two months after reauthorization, about 56 percent of the available funds have been used. That takeup seems kind of low, especially considering that there are only three weeks left to apply. For context, in the previous three-week stretch, only $40 billion was approved, one-third of what’s available. - The American Prospect