James S. Brady Press Briefing Room
1:31 P.M. EST
MS. PSAKI: Hi, everyone. Hello.
Q Hello.
MS. PSAKI: Joining us today is Bharat Ramamurti, the Deputy Director of the National Economic Council for Financial Reform and Consumer Protection.
Bharat was formerly the Managing Director of the Corporate Power Program at the Roosevelt Institute. He also served on the Congressional Oversight Commission for the CARES Act, a position he was appointed to by Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer last year. Previously, Bharat was the top economic adviser to Senator Elizabeth Warren during her 2020 presidential campaign and Senior Counsel for Banking and Economic Policy in her Senate office.
He will give you some brief — deliver some brief remarks, take a few questions. And thank you so much for joining us.
MR. RAMAMURTI: Good afternoon. Earlier today, the President had the chance to visit a couple of small businesses here in town. One is a locally owned hardware store that's been around for 150 years. The other, which leases part of the same space, is an urban farm that was founded just eight years ago.
Like other small businesses across the country, these companies help serve their communities. The hardware store sponsors Little League teams and holds events with the Cub Scouts. The urban farm serves hundreds of local households and supplies food for local farmers markets.
Unfortunately, a lot of companies like this, with fewer than 20 employees, were left out of previous rounds of small-business relief. Too many mom-and-pop businesses and too many minority-owned businesses were left behind, while larger, well-connected businesses got funds quickly.
The President and the Vice President have made it a top priority to ensure that this round of small business relief is distributed more equitably and that the companies that may not have gotten relief before have a shot at getting relief now. So, today we want to share some early results of how this administration is already making good on that commitment.
On Monday, February 22nd, the President announced important changes to the Paycheck Protection Program, which is the primary small-business relief program that the federal government offers. These changes were intended to ensure that mom-and-pop businesses, minority-owned businesses, businesses in rural areas, and other underserved categories of businesses got the help that they needed.
These changes included instituting a 14-day period — starting on Wednesday, February 24th — during which only businesses with fewer than 20 employees could apply for relief. The idea behind the exclusivity period was to give lenders time to focus on reaching out to smaller businesses, including businesses that may not have — that they may not have worked with before, and to make sure that these smaller mom-and-pop shops had their — had time to get their applications in and approved.
And at the same time as the President's announcement, the administration launched a whole-of-government effort to let small-business owners and lenders know about this opportunity; the Small Business Administration launched a series of conversations, reaching thousands of community leaders through webinars every day; White House officials held calls with — that ended up reaching thousands of small-business owners directly; and the administration partnered with Congress to help members spread the word about the changes and conduct outreach with their constituents.
So now we're reaching the end of the two-week exclusivity period and the results are pretty striking. When comparing the data from the exclusivity period with the 10 days preceding the exclusivity period, we've seen a significant increase in the number of loans to the smallest firms, to minority-owned and women-owned firms, and to first-time PPP participants.
Specifically, we've approved more than 300,000 loans for businesses with fewer than five employees, and that's a 15 percent increase compared to the pre-exclusivity period. We've approved nearly 200,000 loans to first-time PPP borrowers, which represents a 25 percent increase.
There's been a 20 percent increase in loans to minority-owned businesses, and that translates to an additional 1,000 minority-owned businesses accessing relie- — relief every single day of the exclusivity period.
There's been a 14 percent increase in loans approved to women-owned businesses, which translates to an additional 600 women-owned businesses accessing relief every day.
And there's been a 12 percent increase in loans approved to businesses in rural areas.
But that's not all. On February 22nd, the President also announced several other changes to expand access to PPP. And as of last Friday, the SBA had implemented all of these changes. And we're already starting to see some early momentum from those changes as well.
For example, nearly 30,000 loan applications had previously been flagged because the small-business owners were delinquent on their federal student loans. We removed that restriction and can now advance those applications. And tens of thousands of new applications have already come in after we increased the amount of relief available to sole proprietors and the self-employed.
