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

25. Small Business Administration · Minor

Require SBA to close out OIG and GAO recommendations within 90 days

Partially done

751 25. Small Business Administration

“Review all internal government watchdog recommendations and require that SBA management implement or address outstanding and ongoing OIG and GAO recommendations within a specified time frame (ideally within 90 days of a recommendation) and on an ongoing basis.”

What has happened

  1. Partially done

    The independent count confirms the reading, and it cuts against moving any higher. GAO's priority open recommendations letter to Administrator Loeffler reports that "[a]s of June 2026, SBA had 60 open recommendations, 14 of which are priority recommendations" and that "[s]ince our May 2025 letter, SBA implemented three priority recommendations" — the May 2025 letter (GAO-25-108048) had identified 17. Three priority closures in thirteen months is not a materially better record than the agency's own Good Accounting Obligation in Government Act appendix implies. The one figure that runs the other way measures the wrong thing: SBA's five-year implementation rate is about 96 percent against a government-wide 77 percent, which is the *eventual* rate, not the 90-day time frame the Quote asks for. No deadline of any length was created, so the time-limit half of the ask remains unmet.

  2. Partially done

    The review half of the ask exists and works: an executive audit remediation strategy adopted in FY2025 takes "a centralized approach" with five target areas agreed by risk, and produced a 67.9% reduction in repeat financial statement audit recommendations against a 25% target, with downgraded material weaknesses and significant deficiencies exceeding target by 150%. The time-limit half does not exist. No 90-day — or any — deadline was imposed, and the SBA's own Good Accounting Obligation in Government Act appendix lists 15 GAO reports and 23 OIG reports whose recommendations were still open more than one year as of 2025-09-30, the oldest running back to GAO-13-217 (2013) and OIG-20-03 (2020).

Research log

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

Research notes

  • Boundary call, raised for the ticket-26 pass. The operative ask is the time frame — “ideally within 90 days” — and no such requirement was created, which would support not started. It is leveled partial because the Quote’s first verb (“Review all internal government watchdog recommendations”) has been carried out for the financial-statement family, with a mechanism and measured closure rates, which is §3’s “a mechanism in place or a piece delivered”.
  • The count of still-open recommendations is the same evidence as #2033, read there for whether leadership answers the watchdogs. Both items now carry GAO-26-108956 as well as the CBJ; the GAO letter is the better citation for the time-limit half, because it is the watchdog’s own count rather than the agency’s account of it.
  • The readable PDF of GAO-26-108956 is https://www.gao.gov/assets/gao-26-108956.pdf; the product page is cited in the frontmatter because it is the stable landing page.
  • The Good Accounting Obligation in Government Act (P.L. 115-414) already requires this appendix annually, so its existence is pre-window; the remediation strategy and the closure rates are not.
Action
other
Object
outstanding OIG and GAO recommendations to the SBA
ID
2039