← Videos · Economy, Tariffs & Trade

Loeffler Testifies Before the House Small Business Committee: 'Budgeting for Growth,' Jun. 4, 2025

June 4, 2025 · House Committee on Small Business · 2:42:10

Embedded from the source channel — never re-uploaded. Watch on YouTube

What happened

The House Committee on Small Business held its full-committee hearing “Budgeting for Growth: Testimony from SBA Administrator Kelly Loeffler” on June 4, 2025, with Chairman Roger Williams presiding and Ranking Member Nydia Velázquez leading the minority. In her opening statement, Loeffler presented the President’s fiscal year 2026 budget request as the SBA’s “return to its mission”: “Streamline services, eliminate waste, and ensure every taxpayer dollar delivers measurable results for America’s small businesses.” She said the agency she inherited was “bloated and dysfunctional,” citing four straight years of failed audits and a flagship 7(a) loan program she said had been “mismanaged to the tune of $400 million of negative cashflow in just one year.”

Loeffler reported the results she credited to the reorganization: the agency had “canceled wasteful contracts for total cost savings of more than $3 billion”; lender fees and underwriting standards had been reinstated; and “in our first a hundred days, SBA loan approvals have skyrocketed by 80%, compared to the same time under the last administration,” with loans to businesses of five or fewer employees nearly doubled and the small-business share of federal contracts up to 23%, from 18% in January, as she stated it. She endorsed Chairman Williams’s Made in America Manufacturing Finance Act (H.R. 3174), which would double the maximum SBA loan for small manufacturers from $5 million to $10 million, and noted the SBA’s new onshoring portal for finding American-made supply-chain partners. Committee Democrats pressed her on the plan to eliminate 2,700 employees — a 43% staff cut Velázquez said was announced without consulting Congress — on the proposed elimination of 15 counseling and training programs, on the SBA’s new responsibility for the federal student loan portfolio, and on tariffs: Velázquez cited survey figures that 58% of small businesses said the economy had gotten worse, 66% believed tariffs were having a negative impact, and 59% listed uncertainty as their top challenge. In one exchange, Representative McIver pressed Loeffler on DOGE access to SBA systems; Loeffler answered that “the premise of your question is entirely false” and that the SBA’s DOGE partner is a vetted SBA employee.

Why it matters

This is the fullest single statement of Loeffler’s SBA program in her first year: the budget, the reorganization, the lending numbers, and the manufacturing-finance legislation she is backing, all tested by the committee that authorizes her agency. The figures she stated here — the 80% approvals increase, the $3 billion in canceled contracts, the 23% contracting share — are dated, checkable claims that anchor her scoreboard record.

Scoreboard watch

This is a candidate item for the weekly scoreboard: Loeffler’s June 4, 2025 testimony figures (loan approvals up 80% in the first hundred days; more than $3 billion in canceled contracts; small-business share of federal contracts at 23%) and her endorsement of H.R. 3174’s $5 million-to-$10 million manufacturer loan increase — each as stated at the hearing, to be checked against SBA lending reports and the bill’s progress.

Sources: House Committee on Small Business, “Budgeting for Growth: Testimony from SBA Administrator Kelly Loeffler,” June 4, 2025 (committee’s official upload, embedded above); committee majority memorandum, May 30, 2025; House Small Business Committee Democrats, “Democrats Press SBA Administrator Loeffler on Budget Cuts, Tariffs, and SBA Services,” June 5, 2025. All figures and characterizations as stated by Administrator Loeffler and committee members at the hearing.