Opinion: The Small Business Relief Program is still broken. But the Treasury Department can fix it.
Aaron Klein is a fellow in economic studies at the Brookings Institution. He served as deputy assistant secretary for economic policy at the U.S. Treasury Department from 2009-2012.
Though well-intentioned and important, the small-business program — known as the Paycheck Protection Program — has been troubled from the start: It ran out of money in 14 days, in part because a huge amount of the money went to businesses that few people would consider "small."such as Potbelly’s, Shake Shack, and Ruth’s Chris Steakhouse received initial money, as did some hotels like the Ritz Carlton in Atlanta.
The good news, however, is that it's not too late to fix the program. The Treasury Department has the ability to correct many of these problems through changing how it administers the program. Here are several ways to that end.First, assistance under the program should be capped at $1 million per loan. Only 4 percent of the loans made in the first batch were for more than $1 million, but they ate up 44.5 percent of the initial $349 billion Congress put into the program.
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