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the Administrator, Deputy Administrator, Chief Counsel for Advocacy, and Inspector General.

Entrepreneurs and small businesses require limited-government policies that do not impede their risk-taking and growth. A future Administration can leverage and strengthen core SBA functions that have been fairly effective at reining in and calling attention to costly regulations and policies that are harmful to small businesses. This core advocacy function is aided both by statutory authority and by a network of small-business organizations and allies that support limited-government policies.”*

Moreover, an effective SBA Administrator and leadership team can work and advocate across the federal government to ensure that extreme regulatory policies—or anticompetitive rules and actions that may favor big businesses over small businesses or international competitors over American small businesses—are dismantled or do not progress when proposed.

MISSION CREEP AND ENLARGEMENT

As noted, Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives have evidenced concern about SBA mission creep and the need to make a sprawling, unaccountable agency more focused and operationally sound. Moreover, there is unease that the agency has moved from being open to any eligible small business searching for support to being hyperfocused on “disproportionately impacted,” politically favored, or geographically situated small businesses and entrepreneurs.

Today, initiatives aimed at “inclusivity” are in fact creating exclusivity and stringent selectivity in deciding what types of small businesses and entities can use SBA programs. For example, even though the SBA under President Donald Trump proposed arule to remove all of the unconstitutional religious exclusions from its regulations” to conform with Supreme Court decisions that have made their unconstitutionality clear, the SBA has not acted on the proposed rule and still uses religious exclusions in determining eligibility for business loans. Several other specific concerns include but are not limited to:

• The SBA’s request to become a “designated voter agency” in response to

President Biden’s executive order on “Promoting Access to Voting.”*°

• The creation of duplicative channels and “pilot programs” for the delivery of business training rather than working through existing counseling partners. The programs are largely duplicative of private, state and local government,

and educational system offerings.*

• Apush to expand direct government lending.”