Aides sent to help swamped small-business agency

The White House is dispatching staff members to the Small Business Administration as the agency struggles with a flood of requests for financial aid to cope with the coronavirus outbreak, according to people familiar with the matter.

President Donald Trump’s daughter and senior adviser, Ivanka Trump, is sending one aide, as is the National Economic Council and the White House communications office, one of the people said.

Other staff members from the Office of Economic Initiatives, the National Economic Council and the Office of Science and Technology Policy have been working with the Small Business Administration and the Treasury Department since before the coronavirus rescue package was passed.

The small-business agency is coping with unprecedented demand for loans historically distributed after small regional droughts or other natural disasters. So many people have tried to access the Economic Injury Disaster Loan program that the agency’s website has failed repeatedly in recent days, Bill Koontz, an agency spokesman in California, said late last week.

Additionally, the agency is on its third administrator under Trump — Jovita Carranza, a former top adviser to Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, has been in the job for almost three months.

Carranza, a top bundler of donations for Trump’s 2016 campaign, has a long-standing relationship with Ivanka Trump. The president’s daughter has fashioned a White House portfolio that includes workforce training and support for small businesses.

Even as it’s inundated with disaster-loan applications, the Small Business Administration and the Treasury Department are hammering out details of a new $350 billion loan system included in the $2 trillion stimulus the president signed Friday called the Paycheck Protection Program. The private lenders that are expected to extend loans under the program are still waiting on details of how it will work.

“The White House, as well as [the Office of Management and Budget] and Treasury, have been working with SBA for weeks on preparations for when the relief bill was passed and the Trump administration could begin actively assisting those requesting assistance quickly,” Judd Deere, a White House spokesman, said in an email.

The new program is supposed to provide loans of up to $10 million per company at a 0.5% interest rate, and companies may have the debt written off by retaining employees or rehiring employees already let go, among other terms. Mnuchin said in a statement Tuesday that the administration expects to have the new loans available by Friday.

Congress appropriated an extra $675 million under the new law for Small Business Administration salaries and expenses to implement the new loan program, above the agency’s $1 billion fiscal 2019 budget.

Firms that take loans from the Small Business Administration are ineligible for another program in the stimulus that provides up to a $5,000 tax credit if they retain workers during the downturn.