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

25. Small Business Administration · Minor

Report to Congress ranking SBA programs by cost-effectiveness in six months

Not started

758 25. Small Business Administration

“The next Administration should undertake a comprehensive review of the effectiveness of its various loan and grant programs and provide a report to Congress within six months. The report should rank programs by cost-effectiveness.”

What has happened

  1. Not started

    No report ranking the SBA's loan and grant programs by cost-effectiveness has been sent to Congress, and none was sent within six months of the inauguration. What the agency does publish annually is the Congressional Budget Justification, whose Table 8 gives every credit program's program level, subsidy amount and subsidy rate — for FY2027, 0.00% for 7(a), 504, SBIC debentures and secondary-market guarantees, 9.23% for the Microloan Direct Program and 18.37% for Disaster Assistance — and whose FY2025 Annual Performance Report gives measures with targets and actuals. That is cost data by program, not a ranking, it covers credit programs rather than grants, and it is the ordinary budget cycle rather than the review the Quote asks for. The words "cost-effectiveness" and "rank" do not appear in the 5,018-line document.

Research log

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

Research notes

  • Leveled with #2070 on the same page, which asks for the budget to be frozen “until the report is considered”: neither the report nor the freeze exists, and the two are recorded separately because the objects differ.
  • The FY2027 Budget’s SBA chapter does give a cost rationale for eliminating the Entrepreneurial Development Programs (“failed business counseling and training programs”, SCORE, the Community Navigator Pilot Program, with the Inspector General’s finding that SBA “did not adequately measure and monitor the program, and overstated performance”). That is a judgment about particular programs inside a budget request, not the comprehensive ranked review the Quote asks for; it is recorded as an event on #2071.
  • Negative search: grep -n -i 'cost-effect|cost effect|rank|effectiveness review|program evaluation' over the extracted CBJ text — one hit, an unrelated reference to the Office of Advocacy’s research program.
Action
other
Object
report to Congress ranking SBA loan and grant programs by cost-effectiveness
ID
2069