Small Business Administration (SBA) Administrator Kelly Loeffler is working to reverse what she describes as years of mismanagement within the agency and steer it back toward serving small businesses while advancing President Donald Trump’s America First agenda.
Loeffler says the agency lost its way under the Biden administration, which prioritized political agendas over financial accountability. In an exclusive interview with the Daily Caller News Foundation, Loeffler outlined her mission of restoring fiscal discipline, cracking down on fraud and ensuring taxpayer accountability.
“We’re restoring the mission of this agency, which is to support small businesses and economic growth in our country,” said Loeffler, who assumed her role in February. “The agency had drifted badly into political waters, supporting DEI programs, effectively turning our lending programs almost into a grant program.”
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Loeffler took particular aim at the Biden-era Do What You Do underwriting standards for the SBA’s primary business loan program. She said the relaxed lending standards exposed taxpayers to unnecessary risk by enabling under-qualified borrowers to be approved for government-guaranteed loans.
“The Biden administration veered off course to the tune of costing $2.2 billion during the four-year cohort of the Biden administration in terms of bad loans,” Loeffler said. “We’ve eliminated that practice, gotten back to the fundamentals of underwriting, stabilized the default rates and made sure that we’re being accountable to taxpayers.”
Much of the agency’s current reforms center on addressing the hundreds of billions of dollars in fraud linked to pandemic-era loan programs, such as the Paycheck Protection Program and the Economic Injury Disaster Loan program. Loeffler said she implemented a “zero-tolerance policy” for fraud on her first day in office.
The SBA found that $630 million in loans were issued during the pandemic to individuals under 18 or over 115, which she said has since been addressed through changes to the application process.
“We continue to crack down on fraud, working with the DOJ, working with others to investigate and finally hold these bad actors accountable,” she said.
Loeffler, a former Wall Street executive who briefly served as a U.S. senator from Georgia, highlighted the cuts made at the SBA in partnership with the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). These cuts include reducing the workforce, which had doubled during the pandemic, terminating $3 billion in what she described as wasteful contracts, and closing 40 offices that had either zero or only one employee.
The administrator also defended the impact of Trump’s America First agenda and his tariff policies on small businesses.
“When you hear the word tariff, think of fair trade. Because that’s what President Trump is fighting for: The American worker that got left behind, the factory that got shut down when its jobs were shipped overseas.” Loeffler stated.
On Wednesday, the SBA commemorated Flag Day with an event that included replacing the American flag at its headquarters with one produced domestically.
“We were on a very bad trajectory prior to this administration taking over because the de minimis loophole alone was decimating our industry,” stated Larry Severini, president and owner of Embroidery Solutions, whose flag now flies at the SBA headquarters. “Had the changes that the administration has brought about not taken place, I’m not sure if this industry — our U.S. flag industry — would have survived.”
Loeffler touted positive economic indicators such as three consecutive months of low core inflation, along with strong job reports and rising small business confidence levels.
“People are spring-loaded to invest. We just need to get the one big beautiful bill passed,” Loeffler said, underscoring key elements such as tax and expensing provisions that she said would ensure “innovation isn’t shipped over to China and then ripped off and used against us.”
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