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

25. Small Business Administration · Notable

Notify Congress the SBA will not enforce religious-exclusion rules

Not started

755 25. Small Business Administration

“The next Administration should immediately: … Notify Congress under 28 U.S. Code § 530D that it will not enforce these unconstitutional regulations.”

What has happened

  1. Not started

    No notification to Congress under 28 U.S.C. 530D about the SBA's religious eligibility regulations was found. The SBA did stop enforcing the disaster-loan exclusion — its 2025-07-14 release says the agency "has reversed this rule" and that faith-related organizations are eligible "effective immediately" — but it did so by announcement, with no §530D letter and no rulemaking, and 13 CFR 123.301(g) is still codified. That the mechanism was available and understood is shown by the SBA's own 8(a) rulemaking, which recites that on 2025-11-25 the Department of Justice advised the Speaker of the House under 28 U.S.C. 530D that the 8(a) rebuttable presumption is unconstitutional and would no longer be defended. The same step was not taken for the religious eligibility regulations.

Research log

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

Research notes

  • The §530D route is real and was used by this administration for a different SBA regulation eleven weeks later, which is why the absence here is a finding rather than an artefact of search. Negative search: Federal Register full text "530D" since 2025-01-20 returns 5 documents (two of them the SBA 8(a) proposed and final rules, none about religious eligibility) and "section 530D" returns 0; 530D appears nowhere in presidential-actions.ndjson, fr-rule.ndjson, fr-notice.ndjson or bills.ndjson; and the complete legacy.sba.gov sitemap (14,836 URLs) has one release on faith-based eligibility, the 2025-07-14 one cited above, which does not mention Congress.
  • Leveled with #2055 on the same page: the agency acted on the substance without either instrument the Quotes name — no §530D notice here, no rulemaking there.
Action
issue
Object
28 U.S.C. § 530D notice on SBA religious eligibility regulations
ID
2053