COVID Economic Injury Disaster Loans

What the program was

The Economic Injury Disaster Loan is an SBA direct loan under section 7(b) of the Small Business Act, made by the agency, for working capital that a disaster has made impossible to cover: fixed debts, payroll, accounts payable, and other bills. The pandemic version, COVID EIDL, lent up to $2 million at 3.75 percent for businesses and 2.75 percent for nonprofits, for terms of up to 30 years (CRS Report R47509, April 18, 2023).

Three grant programs rode on top of it. The CARES Act authorized an advance of up to $10,000, which the SBA limited to $1,000 per employee; the Economic Aid Act of December 27, 2020 (Public Law 116-260) added the Targeted EIDL Advance, a $10,000 payment for businesses in low-income communities with more than 30 percent revenue loss and no more than 300 employees, and a Supplemental Targeted Advance followed (CRS R47509; SBA Targeted and Supplemental Advance FAQ, April 27, 2021).

The SBA stopped accepting new COVID EIDL applications on January 1, 2022, declared the funds exhausted on May 6, 2022, and closed the application portal on May 16, 2022 (CRS R47509).

Congress extended the time to prosecute EIDL fraud in 2022: the archive holds the text of H.R. 7334, the COVID-19 EIDL Fraud Statute of Limitations Act, from its introduction on March 31, 2022 through the enrolled bill of August 5, 2022.

Key dates and amounts

• At publication of CRS R47509 in April 2023, the SBA had approved more than 3.9 million EIDLs totaling more than $378.4 billion, and had disbursed 5,781,390 EIDL advances totaling $20 billion, 601,058 Targeted Advances totaling more than $5.2 billion, and 453,417 Supplemental Targeted Advances totaling more than $2.3 billion (CRS R47509).
• The archive's award-level data is USASpending's export of the SBA's COVID EIDL prime awards: 3,680,124 awards in 38 files, action dates April 2020 through December 2022. The files are date windows sized to the program's pace; June 16 to 20, 2020 alone holds 384,895 awards.
• The House Select Subcommittee's staff report of June 14, 2022 states that $86 billion in EIDL funds were disbursed to applicants with fraud alerts on their applications, and describes the $750 million loan-processing contract awarded to RER Solutions (Idle on EIDL Fraud). Those are the Subcommittee's figures and characterizations.
• The SBA Office of Inspector General estimated in June 2023 that more than $136 billion in COVID EIDL funds went to potentially fraudulent actors, part of a $200 billion estimate across EIDL and PPP (the OIG's Fraud Landscape white paper); its September 2022 report examined EIDL applications submitted from foreign IP addresses.

How it shows up in this archive

As of September 12, 2026, 19 indexed court-filing pages across 11 cases and collections name EIDL in their title or description, as do 11 source documents. 650 DOJ releases name both PPP and EIDL, and many EIDL filings sit under case names that mention neither program; search matches the title and a short snippet of every indexed page.

The collections most worth knowing: the Congressional Research Service's EIDL report; the Select Subcommittee's EIDL investigation, including its letters to the SBA's contractors; the SBA OIG's EIDL reports; the SBA's advance-program FAQ; the H.R. 7334 bill texts; and criminal dockets in which EIDL applications were entered as trial exhibits, such as United States v. Shibley and United States v. Merritts.

In the data section: the USASpending award files, the identity-theft classification of PPP and EIDL prosecutions, and the cross-program matches, in which 44,228 of the 91,448 matched businesses hold a COVID EIDL loan. The matches start from the two grant programs, so a business with only PPP and EIDL is not in that table.

The enforcement picture, counted

Counts from the archive's enforcement tables, not findings about any case.

• The DOJ press-release index holds 2,709 pandemic-fraud releases. 886 name EIDL, from 2020-05-21 to 2026-05-12, and 650 of those name PPP as well. By stage keyword: 294 sentencings, 165 guilty pleas, 137 charging announcements, 73 indictments, 40 convictions, 21 arrests, 8 civil settlements or agreements to pay, and 148 unlabeled.
• The sentencing table holds 1,133 records; 346 name EIDL in the program field (101 EIDL alone, 127 PPP and EIDL together). Among the 346 with a numeric custodial sentence, the median is 36 months.
• The identity-theft classification covers 849 EIDL prosecutions: 137 describe someone else's identity being used, 712 a defendant applying in their own name.

Start reading

1. CRS Report R47509 — SBA COVID-19 EIDL Financial Relief: Policy Options and Considerations (April 18, 2023)The program's terms, timeline, and totals in one document.
2. Idle on EIDL Fraud: Staff Report, Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis (June 14, 2022)The House investigation of the SBA's EIDL processing contract and fraud controls.
3. Clyburn to RER Solutions — EIDL Contracting Investigation (July 30, 2020)The letter that opened the contractor inquiry.
4. Clyburn to Rapid Finance — EIDL Fraud Controls Investigation (February 11, 2021)The follow-up to the subcontractor.
5. SBA OIG Report 22-17 — COVID-19 EIDL Applications from Foreign IP Addresses (September 12, 2022)One fraud indicator, examined.
6. COVID-19 Pandemic EIDL and PPP Loan Fraud Landscape (SBA OIG, June 27, 2023)The white paper behind the $136 billion EIDL estimate.
7. SBA EIDL Targeted and Supplemental Advance FAQ (April 27, 2021)The grant programs, in the SBA's words.
8. Bill text (enrolled) — H.R. 7334, COVID-19 EIDL Fraud Statute of Limitations Act (August 5, 2022)The ten-year limitations period, as passed.
9. Admitted Trial Exhibits (GX 27–70): EIDL Applications — U.S. v. Shibley (W.D. Wash.)What the applications looked like, from a trial record.
10. Exhibit E (EIDL application, April 3, 2020) — USA v. MerrittsA single application, as filed on a docket.