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

25. Small Business Administration · Minor

Hold an accountable SBA leadership that answers to Congress and the IG

Partially done

750 25. Small Business Administration

“An accountable SBA Administrator and staff who report regularly to Congress, respond on a timely basis to requests from individual Members of Congress, and satisfactorily implement or respond to IG and GAO recommendations.”

What has happened

  1. Partially done

    The watchdog says the same thing in its own voice, and adds a fact the agency's account does not. GAO's priority open recommendations letter to Administrator Loeffler reports 60 open recommendations as of June 2026, 14 of them priority, and three priority recommendations implemented since the May 2025 letter (which had identified 17). It also records that SBA's five-year implementation rate is about 96 percent against a government-wide 77 percent — the agency is above average at eventually closing recommendations. The third limb still fails on the letter's own terms: fourteen priority recommendations remain open, in two areas GAO ties to its High Risk List, and GAO asks SBA to "expand and document processes related to COVID-19 overpayments".

  2. Partially done

    The third limb of the ask is not met. The FY2027 Congressional Budget Justification's Good Accounting Obligation in Government Act appendix lists 15 GAO reports and 23 OIG reports whose recommendations were still open more than a year as of 2025-09-30, some dating to 2020 and 2021, and OIG Report 25-25 finds SBA's remediation strategy "could result in a clean audit opinion" but that the agency "can further enhance its implementation to obtain a clean audit". No public record was found either way on responses to individual Members of Congress.

  3. Partially done

    The first limb — report regularly to Congress — turns out to be weaker than the publication record suggests. In the FY2025 Agency Financial Report the Inspector General records, of the disaster loan program's funding lapse: "we found that SBA's monthly reports to Congress did not include all the required components of 15 U.S. Code § 636k(a) and that the informal messages the agency initiated with Congress were insufficient to communicate the pending funding lapse", and sets the agency the challenge of ensuring the reports "comply with the statute" and of giving Congress and OMB "formal notification … as soon as the agency anticipates a funding shortfall". So there is a specific statutory reporting duty the agency is not meeting. The relationship the Quote describes is visibly strained in the same document: the agency's printed response opens that "the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) has appeared unwilling to acknowledge the widespread malfeasance and mismanagement of the SBA under the Biden Administration", and its Chief Financial Officer writes to the Inspector General that management "does not fully concur with several underlying characterizations" in the audit and "does not agree that SBA is not in substantial compliance with the FFMIA", while accepting that the conditions behind the disclaimer of opinion are serious.

  4. Partially done

    William W. Kirk was sworn in as Senate-confirmed Inspector General, restoring confirmed IG oversight at the agency. Around the same period the SBA resumed the reporting half of the ask: the Chief Counsel for Advocacy testified before House Small Business on 2026-01-07, the agency published its 2025 Annual Report on 2026-01-20, and the Inspector General testified before Senate Small Business on 2026-02-25.

Research log

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

Research notes

  • Three limbs: report regularly to Congress; respond promptly to individual Members; satisfactorily implement or respond to IG and GAO recommendations. The first is met, the third is not, and the second has no public instrument at all — annual reporting, testimony and the CBJ are published, correspondence with individual Members is not. partial on the two that can be measured.
  • The count of open recommendations is the same evidence as #2039, read for a different question: here it measures whether leadership answers the watchdogs, there whether a time limit was imposed.

Read-queue ticket 07, 2026-09-06. The row asked whether the 2025 Annual Report says how the agency responds to congressional correspondence — the one limb of this ask with no public instrument. It was found and read (48 pages, sba.gov/annual-report/, PDF on cdn.www.sba.gov) and it does not: the six occurrences of “Congress” in it are about what Congress charged the SBA to do, an enacted budget figure, and legislation the agency is backing. The only SBA artifact on member correspondence anywhere is legacy.sba.gov/document/report--congressional-correspondence, which publishes letters sent to Congress between 2012 and 2016 and was last updated in June 2018. So the second limb stays exactly where the 2026-08-31 pass left it: no public record either way, and now with the search that establishes it. What the read did change is the first limb, which the FY2025 Agency Financial Report shows the Inspector General finding non-compliant in a specific statutory respect — see the 2026-01-21 event.

Action
other
Object
SBA Administrator and staff accountability to Congress, IG, and GAO
ID
2033