Strengthen the Office of Advocacy with a renewed mandate and resources

Research notes

• Three limbs — renewed mandate, additional resources, a research agenda measuring the total cost of federal regulation on small business. Leadership is delivered; the money is requested but not enacted; the statutory mandate is unchanged; and the research limb is not delivered either, on the reading below. partial.
• H.R. 832, the Small Business Advocacy Improvements Act of 2025, passed the House 396–15 on 2025-02-24 and would amend Advocacy’s statutory functions and duties (15 U.S.C. 634b, 634c) to add the international economy and representation before foreign governments. It is a mandate amendment, but not the anti-overregulation mandate this Quote names, and it has sat in Senate Small Business ever since; under §3b it does not move the Status. Text read at https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/BILLS-119hr832eh/html/BILLS-119hr832eh.htm
• H.R. 4305, the DUMP Red Tape Act, passed the House 269–146 on 2025-12-03 and would put Advocacy’s Red Tape Hotline in statute. Also stalled in the Senate. Text at https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/BILLS-119hr4305eh/html/BILLS-119hr4305eh.htm

Read-queue ticket 07, 2026-09-06 — the report was opened, and it is the narrower study. The row flagged that this item cited a finding nobody had read. It has now been read in full: 133 pages, 3,783 lines of extracted text, at advocacy.sba.gov/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/Certification-Abuse-final-report.pdf, reached from the landing page of 2026-01-06. The route is advocacy.sba.gov/wp-sitemap.xml (a WordPress sitemap index whose children carry 2,754 URLs), and the host needs a browser User-Agent — a bare curl gets 403.

The answer to the question the row asked is that it is not “a research agenda that includes measuring the total cost that federal regulation imposes on small businesses”. The report says so itself, in the transmittal letter to the President and the four Small Business Committee leaders: “This report examines thousands of rules that the Biden administration asserted would have no significant economic impact on a substantial number of small entities, otherwise known as ‘certifying’ the rule under 5 U.S.C. § 605(b). The report identifies patterns in, and assesses the prevalence of, unlawful certifications, not the merits or policy objectives of the underlying regulations.” Its method is “machine-assisted classification of every Biden-era final rule published in the Federal Register”, built on a catalog of over 6,000 certifications published 2025-08-05, and its numbers are scoped accordingly: “Unlawfully certified rules would by themselves have imposed between $200 billion and $600 billion in net-present-value regulatory costs on small entities”, and “At least sixty-five percent of major rules did not consider SEEs”, the denominator being 419 Biden final major rules on GAO’s website. Its Section V, “Policy Options to Reduce Certification Abuse”, is six procedural proposals — reconsider GAO’s role in Congressional Review Act review, bar certification of major rules without the Chief Counsel’s approval, limit sanctions under certified rules, restart the CRA clock, consider the PROVE IT Act of 2025, let the Chief Counsel add agencies to the 5 U.S.C. § 609 covered list. None of them is a program to measure the total burden.

Nor is such a program anywhere else in the office’s published research. Advocacy’s Office of Economic Research Annual Report FY2025 (advocacy.sba.gov/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/FINAL_-FY2025-OER-Annual-Report.pdf, 15 pages) catalogs all 21 research products and 2 Census data products of the year and returns zero occurrences of “research agenda”, “total cost” or “cost of federal regulation”.

The rung is unaffected — this item is partial on the resources limb whatever the research limb does — but the note now describes what the report is rather than what it was assumed to be.