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

25. Small Business Administration · Notable · Needs Congress

Require SBIR funds be spent on U.S. capital investments

Not started

755 25. Small Business Administration

“Ensure the enactment of stricter rules requiring that SBIR funds must be expended on capital investments in the United States.”

What has happened

  1. Not started

    No rule requires that SBIR funds be expended on capital investments in the United States. Public Law 119-83 legislates on the adjacent problem and not on this one: §2 ("Bolstering research security of SBIR and STTR awards") makes agencies screen applicants for foreign ownership, foreign affiliations, investment relationships, licensing agreements and business relationships with entities in a foreign country of concern, and lets them decline an award on that basis. That is an eligibility screen on the recipient, not a restriction on where the money is spent: the words "domestic" and "capital investment" do not appear in the Act, and the only uses of "expend" are the strategic-breakthrough allocation and the FY2026-to-FY2027 carry-over. H.R. 4775, the SBIR/STTR Foreign Interference Safeguard Act, was referred to committee on 2025-07-25 and never reported.

Research log

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

Research notes

  • Leveled against #2057 on the same page and the same statute: Congress reauthorized the programs and enacted neither of these two asks. Recorded separately because the objects differ — #2057 is the set-aside percentage, this is where award money may be spent.
  • §3b, progress is measured on this ask: research-security screening is a real, enacted, in-window measure aimed at the same worry (SBIR money benefiting foreign competitors) but it does not require expenditure on U.S. capital investments, so it does not move the rung. The enactment is attached to the not started event so the page shows what Congress did instead.
  • Negative search: full text of P.L. 119-83 for United States (4 hits, all in the enacting and citation formulas or the security lists), domestic (0) and expend (3, listed in the note); Corpus bills.ndjson for SBIR/STTR bills — none imposes a domestic-spending condition.
Action
restrict
Object
use of SBIR funds outside the United States
ID
2058