25. Small Business Administration · Minor
Take down SBA Form 1971
Printed page 755 25. Small Business Administration
“Take down SBA Form 1971.”
What has happened
- Not started
The form was not taken down. It was re-approved. SBA Form 1971, the Religious Eligibility Worksheet, is a listed instrument in OMB control number 3245-0348 — "Borrower Information Form, Lenders Application for Guaranty, and 7(a) Loan Post Approval Action Checklist" — and that collection is **Active**, with an expiration date of 2027-06-30. Inside the evidence window, on 2025-03-03, the SBA submitted it to the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs as a "No material or nonsubstantive change to a currently approved collection", and on 2025-03-05 OIRA concluded it "Approved without change". The instrument list on that clearance names "SBA Form 1971" and "Religious Eligibility Worksheet" in terms. So the record moved the other way: this administration's one action on the object of this ask was to keep it. What the earlier pass found is still true and still matters — the form vanished from loan-origination practice when SOP 50 10 7 took effect on 2023-08-01, seventeen months before the window, and appears in no SOP since (50 10 7.1, 8 and 8.1 all return zero occurrences of "1971" or "religious") — but a form that is out of use is not a form that has been taken down, and the paperwork record is where taking one down would show.
Research log
What was searched, and what didn’t count as evidence
Research notes
pre_satisfied removed 2026-09-06 (read-queue ticket 07). The flag was set on 2026-09-01 on the
finding that Form 1971 was gone from the SOPs before the window and that “nothing in the ask remains
outstanding”. The row asked a human to check reginfo.gov’s Paperwork Reduction Act inventory for the
collection that covered the form and say when it was discontinued. It was not discontinued. §3b’s
amended rule is explicit that the flag needs the ask’s whole object satisfied, and here the object
— the form — is still an approved federal information collection instrument, re-cleared inside the
window. Status is unchanged at not started; what changes is that the item goes back into Still to
come, where it belongs, with the 2025-03-05 clearance attached as evidence that the record moved the
other way.
The route, in full, because the row asked for it and the government-wide file is the answer.
https://www.reginfo.gov/public/do/PRAXML?type=inventory returns the entire active PRA inventory as
one XML document — about 105 MB, RUNDATE="06 SEP 2026", 10,723 active collections, 60 of them SBA
(AgencyCode 3245). Exactly one SBA collection mentions 1971 or “Religious”, and government-wide no
other collection of any agency carries “Religious Eligibility Worksheet”. The human pages behind it
are PRAOMBHistory?ombControlNumber=3245-0348 for the clearance history and
PRAViewICR?ref_nbr=202503-3245-002 for the individual request; both need a browser User-Agent.
Control test, because reginfo has a plausible-looking empty state: ombControlNumber=3245-9999
answers 200 with a 51,336-byte page carrying an empty table, against 77,274 bytes with a populated one
for the real number — so the difference is visible in the byte count, and a negative from this search
is a measurement.
The clearance history shows the form has been carried through every renewal, not overlooked in one:
202309-3245-002 (concluded 2023-11-07, three months after SOP 50 10 7 took effect),
202406-3245-005 (concluded 2024-06-25, expiry moved to 2027-06-30), then 202503-3245-002. The
Federal Register agrees that nothing formal has happened since 2022: full-text searches for
"SBA Form 1971" return five documents and "Religious Eligibility Worksheet" six, the newest of
each being the 2022-06-30 streamlining rule itself.
Pre-window evidence, recorded here rather than in the frontmatter because it is dated before 2025-01-20:
- https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-2022-06-30/html/2022-13483.htm — the 2022 SBA rule removing and reserving 13 CFR 120.110(k) while expressly keeping Form 1971 in effect: “the guidance provided in the Agency’s SOP 50 10 6, at page 146, regarding the submission of SBA Form 1971, will remain in effect until further notice” (87 FR 38908).
- https://legacy.sba.gov/document/sop-50-10-lender-development-company-loan-programs — the SOP 50 10
landing page linking every version. The
.docxfor SOP 50 10 7 (2023-08-01), 7.1, 8 and 8.1 were downloaded and searched: zero occurrences of “1971” or “religious” in any of them.
The in-window development on the same subject belongs to #2055 and #2053: SBA news release 25-62 of 2025-07-14, launching a Center for Faith and “eliminating a regulation … that banned faith-based organizations from receiving SBA disaster loans”. That is a different object (13 CFR 123.301(g)) from the form, and it runs in the opposite direction from this clearance — the agency removed a religious exclusion from disaster lending while leaving the religious eligibility worksheet on the paperwork books.
- Action
- eliminate
- Object
- SBA Form 1971 (Religious Eligibility Worksheet)
- ID
- 2054