AmiSight 3/26: Last Week, A Lot Changed at the SBA

The changes at the Small Business Administration came quickly last week. On Friday, Kelly Loeffler, the new SBA administrator, announced that the agency’s staff would be reduced 43 percent to bring it back to pre-pandemic levels. On the same day, President Trump announced that the SBA would take over responsibility for the sprawling student loan portfolio previously managed by the Department of Education. 

This news is a lot to digest, so let’s break it down and begin with comparing how the SBA  looks today versus how it looked before the pandemic. Among many other initiatives created during the Pandemic, the SBA—in both the first Trump and Biden administrations— issued about 4 million Economic Injury Disaster  Loans with a face value of more than $600 billion. Unlike traditional SBA loans made by a private lender and guaranteed by the government, these EIDL loans were direct loans between the government and the lender.

Keep reading in my 21 Hats column.