This spring has been far from easy for families. Instead of getting ready for the summer, families are staying indoors, finishing school online and holding special events virtually. During these difficult times, relying on community support is more important than ever before. You can see the changes all over town, from breweries becoming hand sanitizer distilleries, to restaurants offering pick up or delivery. To help combat these changes, Wyoming businesses received more than $800 million dollars’ worth of Paycheck Protection Program loans. This helped almost 8,000 businesses keep folks in Wyoming employed and help pay rent, utilities and various other needs. With high demand, the Paycheck Protection Program was replenished at the end of April. Over 70% of the loans are going to businesses that requested less than $50,000. Together, that is more than $1 billion in relief funding for Wyoming small businesses that have been processed by Wyoming’s own community institutions.

While the stories of local businesses have triumphed, the generosity of individuals has not been overlooked either. I am proud of the cowboy spirit and people working hard to overcome these past few months. It’s great to read stories about Wyoming communities adapting and looking out for each other. From providing meals to health care workers, helping senior citizens in your town, celebrating new graduates and more, Wyoming folks are stepping up and showing impressive resiliency.

Enzi and U.S. Senator John Barrasso, R-Wyo., joined a bipartisan group of Senate colleagues in writing a letter to the U.S. Department of Justice requesting that the department investigate potential anticompetitive activities in the highly concentrated beef packing sector.

“Recent pricing discrepancies between fed cattle and boxed beef are pushing cattle producers and feeders to the brink…Cattlemen across America seriously question the ability for their children to take over what are frequently multi-generational family-owned operations that serve as the engines for their communities and our country’s food supply,” the letter reads. “It is critical for the DOJ to act expediently to investigate these concerning circumstances.”

Read the full text of the letter is available here. 

Enzi asked the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) how it plans to implement the Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) program for unapproved drugs, which Enzi said may play a crucial role in helping Americans return to some semblance of normal life during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The EUA program could help make potential COVID-19 therapies available to patients immediately while a possible vaccine moves through the full approval process.

“FDA’s role as the gatekeeper to the United States’ prescription drug marketplace is rarely so visible as it is now,” Enzi wrote. “As such, it is imperative that the public have a clear understanding of how FDA will implement its congressionally-delegated responsibilities and steer qualified therapies through regulatory hurdles on the basis of strong scientific evidence.”