Mississippi’s four members in the United States House of Representatives do not always tend to agree, however, Congressman Michael Guest thinks that fighting for the state of Mississippi amid COVID-19 has brought him and his fellow representatives together.
“On national issues, we generally don’t see eye to eye, but on things that are important to Mississippi, many times the entire congressional delegation will join together,” Guest said. “It is great when we have particular issues that are important to our state when you can have bipartisan support, democrats and republicans working together to help the citizens of our great state.”
On Tuesday’s episode of The JT Show, Guest talked about the letter that him, Bennie Thompson, Steven Palazzo, and Trent Kelly drafted and sent to Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and Small Business Administrator Jovita Carranza requesting further guidance on the loan forgiveness portion of the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP).
“Our entire delegation just sent a letter to the SBA regarding the PPP loans and asking them to extradite the guidelines for the loan forgiveness component of that,” Guest said. “What we don’t want is businesses to come in and three or four weeks from now, be surprised at what they thought was an expenditure that would be able to be eligible for the loan forgiveness ends up not being forgivable, so that’s going to cause great issues for our people here.”
Guest gave credit to the SBA for “tireless effort,” yet called out the agency for not putting enough time into the loan forgiveness component of the PPP.
“Part of the issue is that SBA has been working very diligently to approve these loans, make sure that the businesses that apply that they’re getting the money, but they have not spent the necessary time putting together the loan forgiveness component,” Guest said.
Thus far, the Paycheck Protection Program has approved 40,362 loans for Mississippi small businesses, totaling $3,189,706,683 to assist with certain business expenses such as employee retention.
You can watch the full interview with Guest using the video below.
