Making American small business great again

Op-ed views and opinions expressed are solely those of the author.

President Trump was elected on the promise he made to Make America Great Again. It’s a great slogan – but what does it mean, exactly?

One thing it ought to mean is making up for what was done to small businesses during the four years Joe Biden was president – particularly in the name of the “pandemic.” Small businesses were closed entirely for months or even years and when they were finally allowed to re-open for business, it was only partially and under certain conditions. Many of them – thousands of small retailers, gyms and restaurants – went out of business. The losses were – to use one of the president’s favorite words – huge.

Meanwhile, large chain stores were allowed to remain open with almost no restrictions (on them). Put another way, they were able to hoover up all the business that small businesses were forbidden from transacting.

How to make up for that?

Backers of something called the Made in America Manufacturing Finance Act say it would help do that. It is being promoted in Congress by Senate Small Business Chair Joni Ernst of Florida and the House by Small Business Committee Chairman Roger Williams. It also has the backing of the president’s Small Business Administrator, Kelly Loeffler. The Act would among other things double the current limit for 7(a) and 504 loans available to small businesses from $5 million to $10 million – which Loeffler noted in a May 4 interview with Breitbart, “99.9 percent of our manufacturers” who “create two out of every three new jobs” would qualify for.

Italics added – because most Americans have probably never heard of, and so do not know that almost all of the business done in the United States is done by small businesses. That matters for several reasons, including the obvious one that America’s greatness depends, to a very great extent, on the success or failure of small businesses.

Then there’s the not-so-obvious reason.

It is that these small businesses are often used by the relative handful of big businesses to qualify for loans intended for small businesses via a bait-and-switch called contracting. The architecture of the SBA’s loan qualification program allows a big business to get the loan by making it appear – via contracting – that it is a smaller business. 

Loeffler herself admits this without exactly admitting it. She told Breitbart that passage of the Made in America Manufacturing Finance Act would make it possible for “smallish” manufacturers to “contract” with “the larger manufacturer” – and thereby qualify for an SBA loan. She does not say, however, that these “larger manufacturers” do the same thing except in reverse, using the “contract” to make themselves appear to be the ones in need of the SBA loan.

And she says next-to-nothing about the unaddressed waste, fraud and abuse within her agency.

If the SBA was serious about job creation, it would come clean about three decades of mismanagement and malfeasance – and do something about it.

Why hasn’t it? 

The Breitbart article also quotes that publication’s economics editor, John Carny, who said that SBA loans to small businesses could be increased without the Made in America Manufacturing Finance Act.

“Many of these pro-growth reforms can begin even without congressional action,” he said.

So why the unnecessary show of announcing new legislation? 

We have been writing and calling the Senate and House small business committees. Is the Made in America Act  just political theatre offered up to de-fang our potent complaints about decades of fraud, lax oversight, misguided policies and loopholes at the SBA? 

What is the SBA – and Kelly Loeffler – actually doing to help small businesses?

She says  “there’s no stronger support of small business than President Trump.” But the founder and president of the American Small Business League, Lloyd Chapman, strongly disagrees. He has for weeks been openly accusing the president on social media of being the most anti-small business president in our history, primarily for cutting the staff and budget of the SBA and burdening it with – among other things –  the $1.6 trillion-dollar student loan portfolio.

Most Americans – including those who support the president’s creation of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and its public exposure of waste, fraud and abuse at USAID and other federal agencies probably have no idea that the $1.6 trillion-dollar student loan portfolio has been offloaded onto the shoulders of the SBA.

Why would the SBA have anything at all to do with student loans? Perhaps Loeffler can supply a credible answer to that question.

Chapman is a real champion of small business – and an enemy of the waste, fraud and abuse that has turned the nation’s capital into a “swamp,” as the president famously refers to it. He successfully forced the SBA to release internal documents that proved the agency had ignored protests filed by small businesses against large businesses and exposed that the agency reported contracts awarded to Fortune 500 corporations as “federal small business awards.”

No one can predict the future. And no one wants small businesses to get all the federal support they are legally entitled to more than the American Small Business League. But that does not mean blindly supporting the SBA when what it’s doing doesn’t actually help small businesses – let alone when it operates in a way that harms small businesses. 

Rhetoric isn’t what American small businesses need more of. And it isn’t what Americans voted for. 

Anything that helps to re-industrialize America is great – so the proposal to double the loan limit for small businesses is great. The important thing is to make sure money actually does go to small businesses – and isn’t sluiced to big businesses that use these programs to make themselves greater, at the expense of small businesses.

And at the expense of Americans.

Mark Anthony is a former Silicon Valley Executive with Forrester Research, Inc. (Nasdaq: FORR). Mark is now the host of the nationally syndicated radio called The Patriot and The Preacher Show. Find out more at patriotandpreachershow.com.

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