Kenneth Yowell knows practically every aspect of the restaurant business, from tending bar to dishwashing.

As the owner of the Oak City Meatball Shoppe in downtown Raleigh, he has watched the coronavirus cut his livelihood off at the knees.

While a Paycheck Protection Program loan helped him for a time, he and other North Carolina business owners are now looking to leaders in Washington for action.

"Without some kind of help from the federal government, I don't know where we go from here," he said, warning that more businesses and restaurants could close their doors permanently if there is not more assistance.

However, on Capitol Hill, the months-long stalemate over an additional round of coronavirus relief continues.

Talks about another aid bill are still stalled, as the coronavirus case count surges across the country, putting business owners and workers in a precarious position. With the end of 2020 in sight, several provisions aimed at helping those individuals are set to expire.

This week, President-elect Joe Biden, who will inherit the economic crisis when he takes office in January, called on lawmakers to act, suggesting they pass something like the multi-trillion dollar Heroes Act backed by House Democrats.

“Once we shut down the virus and deliver economic relief to workers and businesses, then we can start to build back better than before,” Biden said at a press conference Monday.

But in Washington, Republicans and Democrats remain divided over how large any aid bill should be and what it should include. The separate proposals touted by House and Senate leaders are well over a trillion dollars apart.

“That should have been done before the election,” said Rep. David Price, D-4th District, of another round of relief. “House Democrats did it six months ago - the Heroes Act - renewing the unemployment assistance, renewing the small business support.”

The Heroes Act, which passed the House, has gone nowhere in the GOP-controlled Senate.

Rep. Dan Bishop, R-9th District, labeled provisions included in the Heroes Act “absurd.”

“I’ve been a believer consistently that we need another package,” he said, while stressing the spending needs to be “targeted appropriately.”

With a new Congress set to be seated in January, can the outgoing Congress reach a compromise during the lame duck period? That remains to be seen.

Yowell, who spoke to Spectrum News 1 several weeks ago, responded this way when asked if he felt supported by the federal government as a small business owner.

“We get a lot of lip service about small business being the backbone of this country but at the end of the day, we don’t really feel like they care," he said.