Project 2025 Tracker / What’s done, what’s next

25. Small Business Administration · Notable · Needs Congress

Extend SBREFA panel requirements to all federal agencies

Not started

758 25. Small Business Administration

“SBREFA panel requirements should be extended to all federal agencies.”

What has happened

  1. Not started

    The SBREFA advocacy review panel still binds only the three agencies 5 U.S.C. 609(d) names. The bill that would extend it, S. 5178, strikes 5 U.S.C. 609(b) through (e) and replaces them with a duty on "an agency making the rule" — any agency, independent regulatory agencies included — to give the Chief Counsel for Advocacy its draft and its impact information before publishing a covered proposed rule, and on the Chief Counsel to convene a review panel within 15 days and report within 60. It was read twice and referred to committee on 2026-07-30 and has passed nothing; its House companion, H.R. 421, died in committee after being ordered reported on 2025-06-10. No executive substitute was issued: no presidential document in the window mentions the Regulatory Flexibility Act or the Office of Advocacy, and Executive Order 13272 of 2002, the standing directive on agency RFA compliance, is unrevoked and uncited by any new order.

Research log

What was searched, and what didn’t count as evidence

Research notes

  • Third item on the same bill, with #2040, #2041 and #2064; all four are not started at the same rung for the same reason, and each carries its own reading of the section that does its ask. Here it is §6, which rewrites the panel provision so that the trigger is the size of the rule rather than the identity of the agency.
  • The distinction that matters for the consistency pass: #2040 is about the 60-day pre-proposal review, this one is about who must convene a panel at all. S. 5178 §6 does both.
  • Negative search: cluster A in docs/research/ch-25.md, plus the govinfo full text of EO 14192, EO 14219, EO 14267 and EO 14270, none of which mentions SBREFA, the RFA, Advocacy or small business.
Action
expand
Object
Small Business Regulatory Enforcement Fairness Act (SBREFA) panel process
ID
2065