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Senator James Lankford joined twelve of his Republican colleagues on Thursday in introducing legislation to extend the deadline for businesses and nonprofits to apply for loans through the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) to Memorial Day on May 31st, 2021.

In a statement, Sen. Lankford said: “PPP was designed to swiftly provide relief for Oklahoma small businesses impacted by COVID-19. The Biden Administration made things unnecessarily complicated by temporarily narrowing access to PPP loans and delaying the process for other qualified applicants. We should immediately extend PPP to the end of May 2021 to address the economic instability caused by the programmatic delays.”

The legislation would also prohibit the Small Business Administration (SBA) from setting priorities for processing the applications of some entities over others except for priorities reasonably necessary to carry out the set-asides created by Congress in the December 2020 COVID-19 relief bill.