It would have been even better had the Paycheck Protection Program worked more like Kurzarbeit does in Germany - instead of just giving money to employers on the promise that they'd use it to protect jobs, insist that the employers use it to pay the wages that employees were going to be missing due to reduced hours, and have to prove that that's where the money went.
Kurzarbeit was one of the main reasons my employer survived the ill-timed purchase of another German industrial giant (deal done right before the 2008-9 financial crisis kicked off, payment due during said financial crisis) without having to lay people off, and left it in the position to get right back into the game once the world economy started improving. And, of course, spared thousands of working people a lot of misery.
Remember what the administration was that put it into place. It was never meant to help people and systems for tracking down where the money went and how it was used were struck from the bills by certain groups of people who usually spend their time saying that you have to add anti-drug rules to government handouts or else the welfare queens will just bleed your country dry.
Kurzarbeit was one of the main reasons my employer survived the ill-timed purchase of another German industrial giant (deal done right before the 2008-9 financial crisis kicked off, payment due during said financial crisis) without having to lay people off, and left it in the position to get right back into the game once the world economy started improving. And, of course, spared thousands of working people a lot of misery.