Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said Wednesday he will ask Congress for additional funding for small business loans if a $350 billion loan pool dries up, CNBC reported Wednesday.

The $350 billion Paycheck Protection Program is part of the $2 trillion stimulus package President Donald Trump signed into law Friday to mitigate the economic impact of the coronavirus pandemic. It seeks to help small businesses pay salary, wage and benefits of employees.

“One of the things I’ve heard is this small business program is going to be so popular that we’re going to run out of our $350 billion,” Mnuchin told CNBC’s Squawk on the Street program. “If that’s the case, I can assure you that will be top of the list for me to go back to Congress on. It has huge bipartisan support and we want to protect small business.”

The Small Business Administration said lenders may begin processing loan applications as early as Friday.

While working from home, we each need to create our own “new normal” to stay in touch with our respective networks. The easiest way to do this is to utilize tools we are familiar with but perhaps are not fully exploiting- things like ZOOM and LinkedIn.

LinkedIn has become an integral part of our ecosystem, yet only a small percentage of those in GovCon use it as well as they could or should.

In Part One, I discussed monitoring your network by regularly scanning both your Notifications page and your Home page. I do this a couple times every day.

Your Home page is where you can monitor what is going on in your network. You can also post information (links to articles, thoughts, shorter ideas) or you can write an article yourself.

Your Notifications page is where you will see birthday announcements, job changes, what people are sharing and commenting on, as well as any references to you.

You should monitor these to find things to comment on, which in turn puts you on the radar via the Home and Notifications pages of those in your network. Your activity will also show up on your own profile. If you are doing this, it’s time to take monitoring those pages to a new level.

To read Amtower’s article in full, please click here.

3M chairman and CEO Mike Roman has issued an update concerning the progress of the company’s capacity of N95 respirators and measures to combat price gouging and counterfeiting, and new partnerships to help protect healthcare workers, the company announced on Wednesday.

“Beginning in January we ramped up to maximum production of N95 respirators, doubling our global output to a rate of 1.1 billion per year, or 100 million per month. This includes 35 million per month in the United States, and over just the last seven days we have delivered 10 million N95 respirators to healthcare facilities in states across the country,” said Roman.

3M has made additional investments and actions that will enable the company to double its capacity to 2 billion globally within the next 12 months. The additional capacity will begin to come online in the next 60-90 days.

In the United States, 3M has projected to produce N95 respirators at a rate of 50 million per month in June, a 40 percent increase from current levels. In addition, more than 90 percent of 3M’s N95 respirators are going to healthcare and public health. The surplus will go to other critical industries, including energy, food and pharmaceuticals.

Within 3M’s U.S. N95 supply, roughly 80 percent will support healthcare distributors. The N95 respirators are moving directly from 3M, to healthcare distributors, to healthcare facilities and end-users.

The remaining 20 percent will be allocated to the federal government, with the largest portion going to FEMA who will distribute it based on their determination of the most urgent needs. The prioritization and distribution of the company’s N95 respirators will be coordinated in close partnership with FEMA.

Given the high use rate of N95 respirators, 3M engineers will collaborate with several sterilization companies to find a way for hospitals to safely clean, reuse and extend the life of these respirators.

“This is not just a 3M challenge; it’s an industry-wide challenge. Even with 3M’s accelerated production combined with capacity from other manufacturers, the reality is that demand for N95 respirators is much higher than the industries’ ability to deliver,” added Roman.

About 3M

At 3M, we apply science in collaborative ways to improve lives daily. With $32 billion in sales, our 96,000 employees connect with customers all around the world. Learn more about 3M’s creative solutions to the world’s problems at www.3M.com or on Twitter @3M or @3MNews.