Ben Cardin: Senate Co-Author of the PPP

In the archive

Pandemic-program role: Ranking Member, then Chair, of the Senate Committee on Small Business and Entrepreneurship; one of the four Senate authors of PPP. Institution - office: U.S. Senate - Maryland - Small Business and Entrepreneurship Committee - Type: elected official Tenure (relief-relevant): Senator from Maryland, 2007 – January 2025 (House historian biography); Small Business Committee ranking member during the original PPP design and chair from 2021 (committee releases 007 and 054).

Ben Cardin, a Maryland Democrat, was one of four senators who wrote the Paycheck Protection Program in March 2020, as ranking member of the Senate Small Business Committee; from 2021 he chaired the committee that oversaw how it was spent.¹² His March 25, 2020 release claimed $377 billion for small businesses, nearly $350 billion of it for PPP. By the time he left the Senate in January 2025, SBA's Inspector General had estimated $64 billion of PPP money as potentially fraudulent.²³⁴

Who he is

Benjamin Louis Cardin served in the Maryland House of Delegates, the U.S. House and the U.S. Senate (House historian biography).⁴

Writing the program

Cardin's March 25, 2020 committee release says he, Marco Rubio, Susan Collins and Jeanne Shaheen secured $377 billion for small businesses in the CARES Act. It itemizes nearly $350 billion for PPP, $10 billion for EIDL advances, $17 billion for SBA debt relief and $275 million for counseling.² The same release said the bill required SBA to cap bank processing earnings and to prioritize underserved borrowers, including rural communities, minorities, women and veterans.²

Pressing the Carranza SBA

As ranking member in 2020 he spent most of the year writing to Administrator Jovita Carranza:

April 8: with Ron Wyden, he asked SBA to tell lenders that businesses owned by employee stock ownership plans qualified for PPP, after reports that lenders were turning them away.⁵
May 9: with Chuck Schumer and Shaheen, he objected to SBA capping EIDL loans at $150,000 when the CARES Act allowed $2 million and to its closing the portal to non-farm businesses. They also objected that SBA had processed fewer than 50,000 applications, under $10 billion, despite $2.775 billion in administrative funds.⁶
May 28: with Rubio, he welcomed a $10 billion PPP set-aside for CDFIs as "though long overdue … a welcome step in the right direction."⁷
May–June: he released a plan with Cory Booker for underserved and underbanked businesses and criticized the administration's lack of transparency on PPP.⁸⁹ On June 20 he welcomed the reversal when SBA and Treasury agreed to publish borrower data, recounting an April 17 request for that data and a May 5 Senate vote in which Republicans blocked a disclosure bill.¹⁰

Chairing the wind-down

In March 2021, as chair, he joined Collins and Shaheen on the PPP Extension Act, which moved the application deadline to May 31, 2021 and gave SBA 30 more days to process pending applications. The committee release restates that Collins, Cardin, Shaheen and Rubio wrote PPP.¹ In July 2021 he announced nearly $130 million in Shuttered Venue Operators Grants to more than 120 Maryland venues.¹¹

His committee then heard the agency's account of the programs. On August 2, 2022, SBA's capital-access chief Patrick Kelley told a hearing addressed to "Chairman Cardin" that SBA had processed 10 million PPP forgiveness decisions worth $743 billion.¹² Three days later Congress extended the statute of limitations for PPP and COVID-EIDL borrower fraud to ten years (Public Laws 117-165 and 117-166, both House bills, signed August 5, 2022).¹³¹⁴ In May 2023, after Kelley resigned, Cardin joined House chair Roger Williams and ranking members Joni Ernst and Nydia Velázquez in a letter calling the timing "extremely concerning" and asking SBA to pause its 7(a) rule changes.¹⁵

The enforcement record from those years is at DOJ pandemic enforcement by year and the fraud estimates at pandemic fraud estimates. SBA's Inspector General put potentially fraudulent disbursements at more than $136 billion in COVID-EIDL and $64 billion in PPP; SBA's own count was about $36 billion.³

Documents and actions

March 25, 2020: announced the bipartisan Senate small-business package with Rubio, Collins and Shaheen.²
April 8, 2020: ESOP eligibility letter with Wyden.⁵
May 9, 2020: EIDL letter to Carranza with Schumer and Shaheen.⁶
May 2020: released proposals on underserved and underbanked small businesses.⁸
May 28, 2020: joined Rubio in welcoming the $10 billion CDFI set-aside.⁷
June 2020: criticized PPP transparency, then welcomed SBA's agreement to disclose loan data.⁹¹⁰
March 2021: introduced the PPP Extension Act with Collins and Shaheen.¹
May 2023: co-signed the letter on Kelley's departure.¹⁵

Since 2025

Cardin left the Senate in January 2025 (House historian biography and Maryland State Archives entry).⁴¹⁶ He joined Johns Hopkins University as a Distinguished Senior Fellow for 2026 (JHU SNF Agora announcement).¹⁷

Documents on this site

Original source documents and archived copies

Patrick Kelley — SBA capital-access chief who testified before Cardin's committee.
Isabella Casillas Guzman — SBA Administrator during his chairmanship.
Jovita Carranza — SBA Administrator to whom his 2020 letters were addressed.
Hannibal "Mike" Ware — SBA Inspector General whose fraud estimate is cited above.

Ben Cardin