small businesses
© ohannes Eisele / AFP - Getty ImagesOnly a fraction of the loans processed have actually been credited to the bank accounts of the thousands of businesses suffering due to the coronavirus pandemic.
One of the main coronavirus relief fund sources for suffering small businesses hit its $350 billion limit Thursday and is no longer accepting any more lenders or applications, the Small Business Administration announced.

"The SBA is currently unable to accept new applications for the Paycheck Protection Program based on available appropriations funding," SBA spokesperson Jennifer Kelly said in a statement. "Similarly, we are unable to enroll new PPP lenders at this time."

The SBA approved 1,661,397 loans from 4,975 lenders before it was exhausted. Due to bottleneck issues between the agency and banks, only a fraction of those have actually been credited to customers' bank accounts.

The emergency fund offered a lifeline to small businesses with fewer than 500 employees, providing loans that turn into grants if used to cover payrolls and avoid layoffs. The hastily constructed program has been bedeviled with administrative issues since its launch less than two weeks ago, with the SBA's loan system crashing under the demand and the nation's largest lenders reduced to manually pushing through a trickle of applicants at a time.

The depletion of the fund's resources had been expected for several days, and is set to launch a battle between Democratic and Republican lawmakers over the shape of additional relief funding. After Secretary of the Treasury Steven Mnuchin asked Congress for an additional $250 billion funding, the Republican-led effort ended in an impasse as Democrats balked at authorizing additional funds without adding protections for more vulnerable borrowers, such as minority- and women-owned businesses.