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

25. Small Business Administration · Notable · Needs Congress

Reform SBIC financing to favor small manufacturers

Attempted

757 25. Small Business Administration

“In addition, Congress should reform the SBIC program to make its financing more favorable to capital-intense investments and small manufacturers. The Health, Economic Assistance, Liability Protection, and Schools (HEALS) Act, introduced in 2020, and American Innovation and Manufacturing Act, introduced in 2021, would allow SBIC to offer longer-term financing to manufacturers and make the program more fiscally sustainable.”

What has happened

  1. Attempted

    Congress has not touched the SBIC statute. The executive routed part-way around it: the SBA's SBIC final rule (effective 2026-02-02) amends 13 CFR 107.720(d) so the project-finance restriction no longer bars financing small businesses engaged in long-term projects — those running beyond 48 months — for the extraction, conversion or processing of critical minerals, and the agency presented the rule as making the program work for "critical industries including manufacturing, food production, energy". That is the capital-intensive limb of the ask, by regulation. The rest is untouched: the same rule consolidates 13 CFR 107.830, 107.835, 107.840 and 107.845 while stating that SBA "does not intend any substantive changes to the minimum or maximum term of financing", so the longer-term financing the Quote's example bills would have authorized does not exist. The bill that would do the ask, S. 2411 (Scale-Up Manufacturing Investment Company Act of 2025, creating a SUMIC program under the Small Business Investment Act), was read twice and referred on 2025-07-23 and has not moved.

Research log

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

Research notes

  • Leveled under playbook §3b: executive action on a Requires-Congress ask is attempted when it routes around the statute and partial when it eliminates the need for it. The rule reaches one of the Quote’s two objects (capital-intensive investment) by regulation and cannot reach the other (longer-term financing terms and fiscal sustainability), which is statutory.
  • Boundary: a reviewer could hold this at not started on the ground that the Quote is addressed to Congress and Congress has done nothing, and that critical-mineral extraction is not “small manufacturers”. Spot-check raised.
  • Shares its instrument with #2060 (p. 756). #2060 is partial because the Quote there asks the administration to reform the program and it did; this Quote asks Congress, which has not.
Action
other
Object
SBIC financing terms for capital-intensive investments and small manufacturers
ID
2061