Well that's exactly why we formed was to impact policy. A group of us had been talking for many, many years about the fact that all the galas, all the fundraising that we do is oftentimes just a drop in the bucket to address some of the bigger systemic issues that we're trying to solve. Things like hunger.
The fact of the matter is that we're being given this money, we're being given an eight week period to spend it on payroll, but in many states we can't reopen. And even in the ones where we just saw, I believe it was yesterday, Texas reopened or today Texas reopened for restaurants, So it's a very unique population that without their jobs back in the restaurant industry, they're going to go right back on to public assistance. So it's not can we afford to bail out the restaurant industry, it's we can't afford to not bail out the restaurant industry.
But more importantly than that, if you own a restaurant and you're currently closed right now, you've already had to apply for the money. There's a window, short, ten days, where once the money comes in, you have to take it or lose it. So you take it in. At that point, according to the regulations as they exist right now you have ten days to start spending it.
And so restaurants who have so many large hard costs, we're locked into longterm rents, we're locked into a lot of other commitments, we have very high fixed costs, have to be backstopped there because you have restaurants opening, mandated in some cases by state laws to only be open with 25% of occupancy. Yet we're paying 100% of our rent. The numbers just don't add up.