House Panel Turns To Lending Reauth
Jul 27th, 2009 | By Dawn R. Rivers | Category: Politics & PolicyCongress has been working with quiet but surprisingly diligent effort to pass the several pieces of legislation needed to (finally) reauthorize the U.S. Small Business Administration — preferably for longer than a few months. So far, bills to reauthorize and “improve” the SBA’s entrepreneurial development programs and its research grants programs have passed in the full House, while the research grants bill has also passed in the Senate and the entrepreneurial development bill is on the calendar. the next item of the reauthorization agenda will be the all important access to capital programs. And that means there is at least a strong possibility that both chambers of Congress will approve a measure to extend the life of the SBA’s loan programs before the fiscal year ends. The House Small Business Committee took the first step down that path when the Subcommittee on Tax and Finance held a hearing last week to review various proposals for improving those loan program.
Given the situation of the capital markets and the fact that everybody in Congress has been bellowing about frozen small business lending for almost a year now, you would have thought the capital access programs would have been the first thing Congress dealt with. Or, you would have thought that if experience hadn’t already taught you that Congress often bellows, noisily and at length, about things that it then fails to fix. From the microbusiness point of view, there was little to report from the hearing. Proposed changes to Microloan sound promising (including introduction of lines of credit and pre-borrowing technical assistance) but lawmakers evinced little interest in the program during questioning.
