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

25. Small Business Administration · Major · Needs Congress

Presumptively exempt small businesses from new agency rules

Not started

752 25. Small Business Administration

“Congress should presumptively exempt small businesses from new agency rules to force agencies to seek Advocacy’s input and permit new rules to apply to small businesses only with Advocacy signoff under specified criteria.”

What has happened

  1. Not started

    No statute presumptively exempts small businesses from new agency rules, and none gives the SBA's Office of Advocacy a sign-off. Four bills in this territory were introduced in the 119th Congress; the only one to clear a chamber — the Small Business Regulatory Reduction Act of 2025 (H.R. 2965, passed the House 223–190 on 2025-12-03) — caps the *SBA's own* rulemaking cost to small businesses at zero and adds an annual Advocacy report on other agencies' rules. It creates no exemption and no sign-off, and it stalled in the Senate Small Business Committee.

    No action found yet. This entry is the starting point, not a finding.

Research log

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

Research notes

  • Bills found in the 119th-Congress Corpus, all short of the ask. govinfo.gov/content/pkg/BILLS-… pages answered HTTP 500 for every one of them; the enrolled/engrossed text URLs below are the readable Primary and were loaded this session.
    • H.R. 2965, Small Business Regulatory Reduction Act of 2025 — reported 2025-05-21 (H. Rept. 119-111), passed the House 223–190 on 2025-12-03, received in the Senate and referred 2025-12-04. Text read at https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/BILLS-119hr2965eh/html/BILLS-119hr2965eh.htm: §2(b) requires only that “the Administrator shall ensure that the small business regulatory budget for the Small Business Administration … is not greater than zero”; §2(c) requires an Advocacy report to Congress. No exemption, no sign-off, and it binds only the SBA. Actions confirmed through api.congress.gov/v3/bill/119/hr/2965/actions.
    • H.R. 1163 / S. 495, Prove It Act — H.R. 1163 reported by Small Business (2025-05-21) and Judiciary (2026-05-04) and placed on the Union Calendar; S. 495 had a Senate Small Business hearing (2025-11-19). Neither passed a chamber. The Act would let small entities challenge an agency’s Regulatory Flexibility Act certification; it does not exempt them.
    • H.R. 421 / S. 5178, Small Business Regulatory Flexibility Improvements Act — H.R. 421 ordered reported 13–12 (2025-06-10); S. 5178 referred (2026-07-30). Neither passed a chamber.
    • H.R. 4305, Red Tape Hotline Act — considered under the same rule as H.R. 2965 on 2025-12-02; it directs Advocacy to run a hotline for complaints about burdensome rules.
  • Settled in the ticket-12 consistency review under playbook §3b: progress is measured on this ask, not on an adjacent bill. Introduction and committee action are not started and one-chamber passage is attempted — but only for a bill that does the ask, and capping the SBA’s own regulatory budget is not exempting small business from other agencies’ rules. This stays not started.
  • Executive side: no executive order or Federal Register document in the window creates a small-business exemption. The whitehouse.gov presidential-actions Corpus contains one small-business document, the National Small Business Week proclamation of 2025-05-05. A Federal Register full-text search since 2025-01-20 for “Regulatory Flexibility” turns up only routine section 610 review lists and an SEC definitional proposal.
Action
other
Object
small-business exemption from new federal agency rules
ID
2043