WASHINGTON — President Trump has signed into law the Paycheck Protection Program Flexibility Act, a House bill similar to one that Sen. Todd Young has been pushing for the last month.
The new law offers what lawmakers are calling much-needed updates and tweaks to the Paycheck Protection Program for businesses across the United States who are taking out forgivable loans from the federal government in order to stay afloat as struggles continue because of the coronavirus pandemic.
“Relief is on the way for so many American workers and hardest hit businesses,” Young said. “In a bipartisan fashion but also with Republican leadership here in the Senate and the signature of the president we’ve been able to pass into law the Paycheck Protection Flexibility Act.”
The most notable tweak to the PPP under the new law is that businesses can now be eligible for loans to be forgiven is 60-percent of the money is used to hire back furloughed or laid-off workers instead of the original 75-percent. Borrowers also have 24 weeks to distributed those loans instead of eight weeks.
“This was also a fix that was incorporated into the RESTART Act that I had proposed,” said Young. “The Paycheck Protection Program is clearly working based on not just the feedback of my constituents, but also from the jobs report we just received.”
The May jobs report shows 2.5 million jobs were created throughout the U.S in the month of May, which Young says indicates that businesses are rehiring workers as expected under the Paycheck Protection Program. Still, the country’s unemployment rate because of the pandemic is still uncomfortably high at around 16-percent.
