The Small Business Administration is reopening its Economic Injury Disaster Loan and EIDL advance grant portal to a broader array of eligible small businesses and nonprofits affected by the coronavirus pandemic.
The portal had been accepting applications only from agricultural businesses for the last month, as demand was high, and those businesses had not been EIDL eligible in the past.
“To meet the unprecedented need, the SBA has made numerous improvements to the application and loan closing process, including deploying new technology and automated tools,” SBA Administrator Jovita Carranza said in a statement.
The EIDL program has gotten less attention that the SBA’s Paycheck Protection Program, which has been popular on Main Street but had a rocky initial rollout with businesses delayed in getting funding and large public companies being shamed into returning funds. As of Sunday, 1.4 million loans had been approved for a total of $95.6 billion through the EIDL program.
To read the full report from Kate Rogers of CNBC, click here.
The loans available under the program had been for as much as $2 million, but that number was dropped to $150,000 due to demand. The program’s emergency grant was also dropped from its initial amount of up to $10,000 per business, to $1,000 per employee, per business.
