Sen. Cardin well, millions of loans have been given out under the ppp program and still have about one and a billion dollars of leeway with ppp loans. The sba and treasury brought this program up as a new program rather quickly and there certainly have been pains in its growth and things that need to be corrected and fixed but the most important thing right now is to get the data to understand how the program is working and then we have to have transparency to make sure that all Small Businesses have opportunities, including those that are traditionally underserved and under banked. Thats our priority, and we are working on dealing with one notable problem with ppp programs and that is the eight weeks set in the time period and it presents certain challenges because we thought the economy would be performing better than it is. We are all in agreement that we have to give some flexibility on that eight week time period. What have we not gotten right either in the first round of supporting this beyond the transparency issue . Were there parts of the way this was designed because later in this session i will have, for instance, the ceo of go daddy, they do domain registration and have lots of insight into micro businesses and micro ventures and they said there is a whole other realm of Business Activity out there that this just did not hit and is this something that you have to look at . Senator cardin remember, this program was designed for Small Businesses and those under 500 workers. It was aimed at getting to smaller businesses because they dont have the resiliency or the cash or liquidity in order to deal with the pandemic like Larger Companies have a better capacity. I think the programs main purpose was to get money out quickly and it did that. It had minimal requirements from the banks in order to grant these loans and some banks performs better than others and some of the early problems were that the fact that we cannot get we cannot get loans to many Small Businesses because they did not have a priority relationship with a bank. Or the bank was just not interested in writing these types of loans even though there was no risk factor to the bank. That was one of our first problems. Secondly, we have businesses that will need help beyond eight weeks and we do have a program called the Economic Disaster loan and grant program, thats there to help Small Businesses in addition to the paycheck protection program. Unfortunately the sca [indiscernible] money out tog the help Small Businesses. Do think it was a mistake, senator, to put this all on and to put all this administratively on the sba . Donna was on my show the other day said why dont we use institutions like we find institutions that knew how to manage the scale and the sba was not designed to do this. Was that one of the flaws in the approach . Sen. Cardin i think that we do not really use the sba but we used Banking Institutions and financial and those the right write the sba loans. That is where most of the hangup was, its not the sba itself so i dont think there was the initial problem but clearly on the idle program the sba has not performed at a level that they need for the format so they are not satisfied at all. As far as using a distant institution we could have but quite frankly, the money got out quickly. The loans are processed rather quickly. And i think most Small Businesses got a ppp loan before individual taxpayers got their check from the irs. So im not sure if there is a better way to start a new program and i think we were successful in getting money out quickly. One of the things that came up in a discussion with secretary mnuchin is the period of time and i may get these numbers wrong, but there was an eight week window and now many of these committees are coming back online and that loan time is too short and saying we need to move it to 12 weeks or much longer time. Where are you in that . What is the right equilibrium for Small Businesses in terms of bringing employees back now but not getting in a guillotine on the loan being due . I certainly support giving flexibility on the eight weeks. When we pay on the program we were hopeful that eight weeks would be long enough for businesses to realistically have the full workforce back in place and that is not the case. I support increasing that time in which you could spend the money and still get forgiveness and we are working on a 16 week proposal in the senate and the house has passed a 24 week proposal. Im for any of these proposals to get more flex ability to Small Businesses to determine when they can spend the money and recognizing the many Small Businesses have just not been able to get back to their full strength because of covid19. This morning senator mark warner and i think doug jones, Richard Blumenthal and Bernie Sanders introduced what is called a paycheck security act , which is to create a paycheck guarantee and i dont know the exact figure but would be retroactive in part for those that have been laid off but my understanding is it would do what france and some European Countries have done which is to keep workers whole and to approach this from another direction rather than through the business right to that laidoff employee. Do you support that kind of approach in addition to what youre doing with Small Businesses . Sen. Cardin i think we got to act in every direction but we are still in the middle of the covid19. What we have done so far under the cares act and the two bills before that really did help our economy and helped save people. If they have money they can provide essentials for their family. It really did help a great deal. It was divided into three different sections and we have to Pay Attention to all three. We did provide individual relief and that is what i think senator warner is talking about. We did provide Unemployment Insurance and did provide irs refund checks and what they are suggesting is that we target additional individual relief to those who need it the most. And i strongly support that type of an approach. But dont leave out state and local governments. They do not have the resources in order to provide essential services to people, state and local government are seen dramatic revenue reductions and the cares act to not provide help for state and local governments for revenue declines. We got to get to that. Lastly, we do have to help businesses. If our businesses can survive we will not have the jobs ready when our economy comes back and particularly, Small Businesses do not have the resiliency and, quite prickly, the programs that we have passed so far for many Small Businesses will not make it. Senator, we have a question for you from someone in the audience. As ive been told, this is from desoto, texas. We will get there in a second but not yet. I want to jump out of Small Business and i want to ask you because i know you do Global Affairs as well. You know about the world and we had focus on china and chinas transparency problems at the beginning of this but also economic dependencies and production dependencies on china. You and i have talked about Global Affairs before so where are we right in criticizing china and where do we need to be careful . Sen. Cardin china is not our friend. We need to have a strategic policy, as relates to china. We need to work with our allies in dealing with china. I disagree with president trump, his approach, which was basically do it alone. He first made the challenges with china on trade but first alienated our traditional allies with the steel and aluminum tariff and isolated america and we could have used the help from our allies in isolating china. China doesnt play fairly. They want to control the rules. They dont believe in our values and they want to see government control the economies and control the rules of international commerce. We do not want to see that happen. We dont have the strategic relationship. Its an important country and a large country and we do a lot of trade with china. But we need to do that in a smarter way, recognizing that our values need to be forefront of our relationship with that country. And it has not in the past. We reached out to the world and said send us notes and engage, we will try to get a question right now from desoto, texas. Director ofecutive the industry hub in desoto texas desoto, texas. We help Small Businesses get started and grow. Set asiden is, you 350 billion dollars to help Small Businesses. That program was botched by sba and the banks. Youve also set aside 500 billion for large companies, most of which has not been spent. What i want to know is what are you going to do to help Small Businesses. They are 98 of the businesses in this country, and they need help and they need help now. A bit of a terry, critic there. But what would you like to share . We set aside over 700 billion for small 660 alone for the program, another 20 in the idol grand programming and 50 in the middle School Program so we set aside a great deal. Somewhere around 5 million given out to Small Businesses. That is a large number close to 500 billion has gone out. Much of that will be forgiven under the terms of paycheck protection program. Weve given out another 10 Million Dollars in grants. I think we are trying to be mindful. Ive talked to a lot of small at what weto look need to do at a National Level to pass a lifeline to keep them afloat. Do we need more help from absolutely but the next round should be targeted to those businesses that really need it, the smaller of the Small Businesses. Those traditionally underserved communities. Those that have dramatic revenue losses. We couldnt do that on the first round because we want to get money out quickly. We can now be more discerning on how we target money to Small Businesses that really need help. Let me ask you quickly in the broadside of getting the social contract right. Ive talked to a lot of people this morning and previously thats when a crisis comes its not just about recovery and getting back to where we need to go. Its about restoring america, advancing america, strengthening , changing social contract. Can you give me two or three things we can do better than we did before . We would call this a National Forum on recovery but we didnt, we called it the National Forum on advancing the economy. I would love your last couple of thoughts about how we can change the frame. Sen. Cardin its a great question and one of the reasons we want to help Small Businesses. They are going to find out a way to do things better. They are more innovative and create jobs and when we come out of covid19, our economy is going to be different. We need businesses that can adjust to the realities of postcovid19. We really do believe that Small Businesses can help in that direction. Second, when we look at programs that can help generate jobs, a lot of people are not working, we have to create jobs. Lets look at infrastructure. Strong bipartisan support to improve connectivity that would not only create jobs but at the end of the day we will have a more Resilient Society to deal with the challenges of our community and the global competition. I hope that will come together shortly on the infra structure package which will help us create the jobs and the type of community that we are going to need when we get out of covid19. Senator, its great to see you. You are my senator because i live in maryland. I always enjoy spending time with you. Thank you for your insights. Sen. Cardin my pleasure, did to be with you, stay well. Heres whats coming up today on cspan, new Jersey Governor Phil Murphy will give an update on his states response to the coronavirus pandemic. Thats at 11 00 eastern, we will get you there after the house pro forma session which gets underway at 11 lucky. Eastern. 00 and later a White House Briefing with kayleigh mcenany, we will have that live here on cspan. Thefinally, democrats on House Judiciary Committee will hold a discussion on the trump administrations response to the spread of coronavirus in prison than jails. Watch that live at 4 00 eastern. Online at cspan. Org. 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