25. Small Business Administration · Minor

Move the disaster loan program out of the SBA

Not started

Printed page 754 25. Small Business Administration

“Work with Congress to assess the extent to which disaster loans should be offered by another agency rather than the SBA and explore private-sector channels for administering the loans.”

What has happened

Jun 5, 2026 Not started
No assessment of whether disaster loans should be offered by another agency, and no exploration of private-sector channels for administering them, was found on any allowlisted source. The record inside the window runs the other way. The SBA's June 2026 agency-wide reorganization centralizes disaster-related functions further inside the SBA, in its own Office of Disaster Recovery, "to improve responsiveness, streamline recovery operations, and optimize service delivery for disaster survivors"; the March 2025 reorganization had already moved disaster loan servicing and additional personnel into that office. In January 2026 the agency issued an interim final rule to speed its own section 7(b) lending rather than to hand it over. The FY2027 Budget's SBA chapter proposes no transfer and requests $143 million for the Disaster Loan Program. The three bills of the 119th Congress that amend SBA disaster lending (H.R. 1375, H.R. 2897, H.R. 3557) all leave the program at the SBA and none was reported out of committee. The FEMA Review Council established by Executive Order 14180 and twice continued advises the President on FEMA alone and does not reach SBA disaster lending.
- SBA news release 26-57: “SBA Announces Agency-Wide Reorganization to Modernize, Drive Operational Efficiency, and Enhance Accountability to Taxpayers”
  Primary Executive branch Jun 5, 2026
- SBA interim final rule: Improving SBA Disaster Loan Ability To Provide Meaningful and Timely Assistance
  Primary Executive branch Jan 29, 2026

Research log

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

Research notes

The Quote asks for two things, an assessment made in consultation with Congress and an exploration of private-sector administration. Neither exists as a document. Recorded as not started with the contrary in-window actions attached under playbook §3b: the agency is consolidating the program inward, not preparing to move it out.
requires_congress was cleared on 2026-09-01 in the ticket-26 phase-2 sweep, on the site owner’s own reading of this item: the act asked for is an assessment and an exploration, both of which the SBA can perform, and the transfer that would follow is a downstream contingency rather than the ask. The Status is unchanged; the item now sits with the executive-feasibility items in Still to come, which is where an assessment the agency could begin tomorrow belongs.
Negative search (cluster C in docs/research/ch-25.md): Corpus bills.ndjson for disaster-loan bills of the 119th Congress; the FY2027 Budget main volume and the SBA FY2027 CBJ; the presidential-actions file for FEMA; and the Federal Register SBA agency filter.
Executive Order 14180 (Council To Assess the Federal Emergency Management Agency, 2025-01-24) and its two continuances were read for an SBA limb and have none — §3 confines the Council to advising “on the existing ability of FEMA”. Recorded here as a lead rather than as Evidence because it is about a different agency.

Action: transfer
Object: SBA disaster loan program
ID: 2051