The goal here was to give the money out ASAP as businesses and their employees had already been forced to shutter by the pandemic and lockdown orders and were rapidly marching toward insolvency.
Stuff like the 9/11 compensation fund was on a much longer timeline and was also much smaller - the 9/11 fund was open ended, but ended up being about $7 billion, compared to the $349 billion PPP.
Remember the PPP is intended to give out money to the entire country and that is a huge scale. There was no available mechanism to give out the money, the SBA administers a EIDL grant/loan program but lawmakers on both sides of congress didn’t believe the SBA could give the money out fast enough, so this system of having the banks get money from the SBA was created.
